On entering my berth I threw myself into my bunk and sat in it in such a despondent condition of mind as I had never before been sensible of. This, to be sure, signified no more than reaction following the wild excitement I had been under all the morning. But, let the cause be what it might, whilst the fit was on me I felt abjectly miserable, and a complete wretch. It then occurred to me that hunger might have something to do with my mood, seeing that no food had crossed my lips since dinner time on the preceding day.
It was about two o’clock in the afternoon. I entered the cabin and found a cold lunch upon the table, not a dish of which had been touched, proving that there were others besides myself who were fasting. I was without appetite, but I sat down resolutely, and calling to the steward—who seemed thankful to have an order to attend to—to bring me a bottle of Burgundy, I fell to, and presently found myself tolerably hearty; the fountain of my spirits unsealed afresh, and beginning leisurely to bubble into the channel that had run dry. There is no better specific in the world for a fit of the blues than a bottle of Burgundy. No other wine has its art of tender blandishments. It does not swiftly exhilarate, but courts the brain into a pleasing serenity by a process of coaxing at once elegant and convincing.
Whilst I sat fondling my glass, leaning back in my chair with my eyes fixed upon the delicate, graceful paintings on the cabin ceiling, and my mind revolving, but no longer blackly and weepingly, the grim incidents which had crowded the morning, I heard my name pronounced close at my ear, and, whipping round, found Miss Laura at my elbow.
‘I have been most anxious to see you,’ she exclaimed. ‘What is the news?’
‘Have you not heard?’ I inquired.
‘I have heard nothing but two pistol shots. I have seen nobody of whom I could ask a question.’
‘Wilfrid has shot Colonel Hope-Kennedy through the heart,’ said I, ‘as he declared he would, and the body lies yonder;’ and I pointed to the recess that Muffin had formerly occupied.
‘Colonel Hope-Kennedy killed!’ she exclaimed, in a low, breathless, terrified voice; and she sank into a chair beside me, and leant her face on her hand speechless, and her eyes fixed upon the table.
‘Better that he should have been shot than Wilfrid,’ said I. ‘But he is dead; of him, then, let us speak nothing since we cannot speak good. I have just succeeded in fighting myself out of a hideous mood of melancholy with the help of yonder bottle. Now you must let me prescribe for you. You have eaten nothing since dinner yesterday. I therefore advise a glass of champagne and a slice of the breast of cold fowl;’ and that she might not say no, I put on an air of bustle, called to the steward to immediately open a pint bottle of champagne, helped her to a little piece of the fowl, and, finding her still reluctant, gently insinuated a knife and fork into her hands. ‘We are homeward bound,’ said I; ‘see! the sun has slipped t’other side of the yacht. Our bowsprit points directly for dear old Southampton Water. So,’ said I, filling a glass of champagne and handing it to her, ‘you must absolutely drink to our prosperous voyage, not only to the ship that goes, but to the wind that blows, whilst,’ said I, helping myself to another small dose of Burgundy, ‘I’ll drink the lass that loves a sailor.’
She could not forbear a slight smile, drank, and then ate a little, and presently I saw how much good it did her by the manner in which she plucked up her heart. I asked her where Lady Monson was.
‘In my cabin,’ she answered; ‘she will not speak to me; she asks my maid for what she requires; she will not even look at me.’
‘It is all too fresh yet,’ said I. ‘A little patience, Miss Jennings. The woman in her will break through anon; there will be tears, kisses, contrition. Who knows?’
She shook her head. Just then I caught sight of the maid, beckoned to her, exclaiming to Miss Laura, ‘Your sister must not be allowed to starve. I fear she will have known what hunger is aboard Captain Crimp’s odious old barque, where the choicest table delicacy probably was rancid salt pork. Here,’ said I to the maid, ‘get me a tray. Steward, open another bottle of champagne. You will smile at the cook-like view I take of human misery, Miss Jennings,’ said I; ‘but let me tell you that a good deal of the complexion the mind wears is shed upon it by the body.’
I filled the tray the maid brought, and bade her carry it to her ladyship, and to let her suppose it was prepared by the steward. I then thought of Wilfrid, and told Miss Laura that I would visit him. ‘But you will stop here till I return,’ said I. ‘I want you to cheer me up.’
I went to my cousin’s cabin and knocked very softly. The berth occupied by Lady Monson was immediately opposite, and the mere notion of her being so near made me move with a certain stealth, though I could not have explained why I did so. There was no response, so, after knocking a second time very lightly and obtaining no reply, I entered. Wilfrid lay in his bunk. The porthole was wide open, and a pleasant draught of air breezed into the cabin. He lay in his shirt, the collar of which was wide open, and a pair of silk drawers, flat on his back, his arms crossed upon his breast, like the figure of a knight on a tomb, and his eyes closed. I was startled at first sight of him, but quickly perceived that his breast rose and fell regularly, and that, in short, he was in a sound sleep. Quite restful his slumber was not, for whilst I stood regarding him he made one or two wry faces, frowned, smiled, muttered, but without any nervous starts or discomposure of his placid posture. I was seized with a fit of wonder, and looked about me for some signs of an opiate or for any hint of liquor that should account for this swift and easy repose, but there was nothing of the sort to be seen. He had fallen asleep as a tired child might, or as one who, having accomplished some great object through stress of bitter toil and distracting vigil, lightly pillows his head with a thanksgiving that he has seen the end. I returned to Miss Jennings marvelling much, and she was equally astonished.
‘Conceive, Mr. Monson,’ she exclaimed, ‘that the whole may have passed out of his memory!’
‘I wish I could believe it,’ said I. ‘No, he has just lain down as a boy might who is tired out and dropped asleep. A man is to be envied for being wrongheaded sometimes. If I had shot the Colonel—— but we agreed not to speak of him. Miss Jennings, you are better already. When you arrived just now you were white, your eyes were full of worry and care, you looked as if you would never smile again. Now the old sparkle is in your gaze, and now you smile once more, and your complexion has gathered afresh that golden delicacy which I must take the liberty of vowing as a friend I admire as a most surprising perfection in you.’
‘Oh, Mr. Monson,’ she exclaimed softly, with one of those little pouts I was now used to and glad to observe in her again, whilst something of colour came into her cheeks, ‘this is no time for compliments.’
Nevertheless she did not seem ill pleased, spite of her looking downwards with a gravity that was above demureness. At that moment Cutbill and Crimp came down the companion ladder, pulling off their caps as they entered. The big sailor had a roll of what resembled sailcloth under his arm. They passed forward[238] and disappeared in the cabin that had been occupied by Muffin. Miss Laura noticed them, but made no remark. It was impossible that she should suspect their mission. But the sight of them darkened the brighter mood that had come to me out of the companionship of the girl, and I fell grave on a sudden.
‘Will you share your cabin with your sister?’ I asked.
‘No; she cannot bear my presence. My maid will prepare for me the berth adjoining my old one. She must be humoured. Who can express the agonies her pride is costing her?’
‘I fear Wilfrid sleeps rather too close to her ladyship,’ said I. ‘There’s a cabin next mine. I should like to see him in it. Figure his taking it into his head in an ungovernable fit of temper to walk in upon his wife——’
‘If such an impulse as that visited him,’ she answered, ‘it would be all the same even if he should sleep amongst the crew forward. Do not anticipate trouble, Mr. Monson. The realities are fearful enough.’
I smiled at her beseeching look. ‘Lucky for your sister,’ said I, ‘that you are on board. She arrives without a stitch saving what she stands up in, and here she finds your wardrobe, the two-score conveniences of the lady’s toilet table, and a maid on top of it all, with pins and needles and scissors, bodkins and tape—bless me! what a paradise after the “’Liza Robbins.”’ And then I told her how the ‘Shark’ was lost, giving her the yarn as I had it from Finn. ‘Anyway,’ said I, ‘Lady Monson is rescued. Your desire is fulfilled.’
‘But I did not wish her—I did not want Colonel Hope-Kennedy killed,’ she exclaimed with a shudder.
‘Yet you could have shot him,’ said I; ‘do you remember our chat that night off the Isle of Wight?’
‘Yes, perfectly well,’ she answered. ‘But now that he is dead—oh, it is too terrible to think of,’ she added with a sob in her voice.
‘It must always be so with generous natures,’ I exclaimed. ‘What is abhorrent to them in life, death converts into a pathetic appeal. Best perhaps to leave old Time to revenge one’s wrongs. And now that her ladyship is on board, what is Wilfrid going to do with her?’
‘She is never likely to leave her cabin,’ she replied.
‘When the “Bride” arrives home, then?’
‘I cannot tell.’
‘Had Wilfrid’s misfortune been mine this is the consideration that would have stared me in the face from the very start and hindered me from taking any step that did not conduct me straight to the Divorce Court.’
Here her maid arrived and whispered to her, on which, giving me a pretty little sad smile, she rose and went to her cabin. I mounted to the deck and found the wide ocean shivering and flashing under a pleasant breeze of wind, whose hot buzzing as it hummed[239] like the vast insect life of a tropic island through the rigging and into the canvas, was cooled to the ear by the pleasant noise of running waters on either hand. My first look was for the ‘’Liza Robbins,’ and I was not a little surprised to find her far away down upon our lee quarter, a mere dash of light of a moonlike hue. Finn was pacing the quarterdeck solemnly with a Sunday air upon him. On seeing me he approached with a shipshape salute and exclaimed:
‘I suppose there is no doubt, sir, his honour designs that we should be now steering for home?’
‘For what other part of the world, captain?’
‘Well, sir, at sea one wants instructions. Maybe Sir Wilfrid knows that we’re going home?’
‘He lies sleeping as soundly and peacefully, Finn, as a little boy in his cabin, and knows nothing.’
‘Lor’ bless me!’ cried Finn.
‘But you may take me as representing him,’ said I, ‘and I’ll be accountable for all misdirections. About the funeral now. I observed Cutbill and Crimp pass through the cabin. They’ve gone to stitch the body up.’
‘Yes, sir. His honour told me to get it done at once. ’Sides, ’tain’t a part of the ocean in which ye can keep the like of them things long.’
‘When do you mean to bury him?’
‘Well, I thought to-night, sir, in the first watch. Better make a quiet job of it, I allow, for fear of——’ and screwing up his face into a peculiar look, he pointed significantly to the deck with clear reference to Lady Monson.
‘You are right, Finn. We have had “scenes” enough, as scrimmages are called by women.’
‘Will your honour read the orfice?’
‘D’ye mean the burial service? It will be hard to see print by lantern light.’
‘I’ve got it, sir, in a book with the letters as big as my forefinger.’
I considered a little and then said, ‘On reflection, no. You are captain of this ship, and it is for you, therefore, to read the service. I will be present, of course.’
He looked a trifle dismayed, but said nothing more about it, and, after walking the deck with him for about half an hour, during which our talk was all about the ‘Shark’ and the incidents of the morning, what the crew thought of the duel and the like, I went below to my berth, and lay down, feeling tired, hot, and again depressed. I was awakened out of a light sleep by the ringing of the first dinner bell. Having made ready for dinner I entered the cabin as the second bell sounded, and found the table prepared, but no one present. I was standing at the foot of the companion ladder, trying to cool myself with the wind that breezed down of a fiery hue with the steadfast crimsoning of the westering sun, when Wilfrid came from his cabin. He was dressed as if for a ball—swallow-tail[240] coat, patent leather boots, plenty of white shirt sparkling with diamond studs, and so forth. Indeed, it was easily seen that he had attired himself with a most fastidious hand, as though on a sudden there had broken out in him a craze of dandyism. I was much astonished, and stared at him. There had never been any ceremony amongst us; in point of meals we had made a sort of picnic of this marine ramble, and dined regardless of attire. Indeed, in this direction Wilfrid had always shown a singular negligence, often in cold weather sitting down in an old pilot coat, or taking his place during the hot days in white linen coat and small-clothes or an airy camlet jacket.
‘Why, Wilf,’ said I, running my eye over him, ‘you must give me ten minutes to keep you in countenance.’
‘No, no,’ he cried, ‘you are very well. This is a festal day with me, a time to be dignified with as much ceremony as the modern tailor will permit. Heavens! how on great occasions one misses the magnificence of one’s forefathers. I should like to dine to-day in the costume of a Raleigh, a doublet bestudded with precious gems, a short cloak of cloth of gold. Ha, ha! a plague on the French Revolution—’tis all broadcloth now. Where’s Laura?’ He asked the question with a sudden breaking away from the substance of his speech that startlingly accentuated the wild look his eyes had and the expression of countenance that was a sort of baffling smile in its way.
‘I do not know,’ I answered.
‘Oh, she must dine with us,’ he cried; ‘I want company. I should like to crowd this table. Steward, call Miss Jennings’ maid.’
The man stole aft and tapped on the cabin next to the room occupied by Lady Monson. Miss Jennings opened the door and looked out. Wilfrid saw her, and instantly ran to her, with his finger upon his lip. He took her by the hand and whispered. She was clearly as much amazed as I had been to behold him attired as though for a rout. There was a little whispered talk between them; she apparently did not wish to join us; then on a sudden consented, and he led her to the table, holding her hand with an air of old-world ceremony that must have provoked a smile but for the concern and anxiety his looks caused me. We took our places, and he fell to acting the part of host, pressing us to eat, calling for champagne, talking as if to entertain us. He laughed often, but softly, in a low-pitched key, and one saw that there was a perpetual reference in his mind to the existence of his wife close at hand, but he never once mentioned her nor referred to the dead man whose proximity put an indescribable quality of ghastliness into his hectic manner, the crazy air of conviviality that flushed, as with a glow of fever, his speech, and carriage, and behaviour of high breeding. Not a syllable concerning the events of the morning, the objects of our excursion, its achievement, the change of the yacht’s course escaped him. He drank freely, but without any[241] other result than throwing a little colour upon his high cheek-bones and rendering yet more puzzling the conflicting expressions which filled with wildness his large, protruding, near-sighted gaze at one or the other of us. I saw too clearly how it was with the poor fellow to feel shocked. Miss Laura’s tact served her well in the replies she made to him, in the interest with which she seemed to listen to his conversation, in her well-feigned ignorance of there being anything unusual in his apparel or manner. But it failed her in her efforts to conceal her deep-seated apprehension, that stole like a shadow into her face when she looked downwards in some interval of silence that enabled her to think, or when her eyes met mine.
After dinner my cousin fetched his pipe and asked me to join him on deck. I took advantage of his absence to say swiftly to Miss Laura, ‘We must not forget that Lady Monson is on board. Upon my word, I believe you are right in your suggestion this afternoon that Wilfrid has forgotten all about it, or surely he would have made some reference to her dining.’
‘I’ll take care that she is looked after, Mr. Monson,’ she answered. ‘I purposely abstained from mentioning her name at dinner. I am certain, by the expression in his face, that he would have been irritated by the lightest allusion to her, and unnatural as his mood is after such a morning as we have passed through,’ here she glanced in the direction of the cabin where the Colonel’s body lay, ‘I would rather see him as he is than sullen, scowling, silent, eating up his heart.’
He returned with his pipe at that moment, and we were about to proceed on deck when he stopped and said to his sister-in-law, ‘Come along, Laura, my love.’
‘I have a slight headache, Wilfrid, and I have to see that my cabin is prepared.’
I thought this answer would start him into questioning her, but he looked as if he did not gather the meaning of it. ‘Pooh, pooh!’ he cried, ‘there are two stewards and a maid to see to your cabin for you. If they don’t suffice we’ll have Muffin aft; that arthritic son of a greengrocer, whose genius as a valet will scarcely be the worse for the tar that stains his hands. Muffin for one night only!’ He delivered one of his short roars of laughter and slapped his leg.
By Jupiter! thought I, Lady Monson will hear that and take it as an expression of his delight at her presence on board! Does she know, I wondered, that her colonel lies dead? But I had found no opportunity of inquiring.
‘Come along, Laura,’ continued Wilfrid; ‘I’ll roll you up as pretty a cigarette as was ever smoked by a South American belle.’
She shook her head, forcing a smile.
‘Perhaps Miss Jennings will join us later,’ said I, distrustful of his temper, and passing my hand through his arm, I got him on deck.
‘Laura is a sweet little woman,’ said he, pausing just outside the hatch to hammer at a tinder-box.
‘Ay, sweet, pretty, and good,’ said I.
‘You’re in love with her, I think, Charles.’
‘My dear Wilf, let us talk of this beautiful night,’ I exclaimed.
‘Why of a beautiful night in preference to a beautiful woman?’ cried he.
But I was determined to end this, so I called to a figure standing to leeward of the main boom, ‘Is that you, Finn?’
‘No, it’s me,’ answered Crimp’s surly note; ‘the capt’n’s a-laying down, but he’s guv orders to be aroused at four bells.’
‘Why?’ inquired Wilfrid.
Crimp probably supposed the question put to me, for which I was thankful. ‘He may mistrust the weather, perhaps,’ I answered softly, that old Jacob might not hear. ‘Yet the sky has a wonderfully settled look too. Let’s go right aft, shall we, Wilf? The downdraught here is emptying my pipe.’
We strolled together to the grating abaft the wheel and seated ourselves. I cannot tell how much it affected me to find him so easily thrown off the line of his thoughts. It had been dark some time, for in those parallels night treads on the skirts of the glory which the departing sun trails down the western slope of the sea. There would be no moon sooner than ten o’clock or thereabouts, and it was now a little after eight—for my cousin’s strange humour had made a much longer sitting than usual of the dinner. There was a refreshing sound of rushing wind in the star-laden dusk, a noise as of the sweeping of countless pinions, with a smooth hissing penetrating from the cutwater that made one think of the shearing of a skater over ice. The cabin lamps glowing into the skylight shed a yellow, satin-like sheen upon the foot of the mainsail, the cloths of which soared the paler for that lustre till the head of the gaff topsail looked like the brow of some height of vapour dissolving against the stars. We sat on a line with the side of the deck on which he had shot Colonel Hope-Kennedy. The gloom worked the memory of the incident to me into a phantasm, and I remember a little shiver creeping over me at the vision of that tall, noble figure with face upturned to heaven a moment or two as though he watched the flight of his spirit, then falling dead with the countenance of a man in easy slumber. But Wilfrid had not a word to say about it. I could not reconcile his extraordinary silence with his attire and manner, which at all events indicated the recollection of the duel as strong in him. He chatted volubly and intelligently, without any of his customary breakings away from his train of thought; but not of his wife, nor of the Colonel, nor of his infant, nor of this ocean chase that was now ended so far as the fugitives were concerned. He talked of his estate; how he intended to build a wing to his house that should contain a banqueting room, how he proposed to convert some acres of his land into a market garden, and so on and so on. His face showed pale in the starlight;[243] his evening costume gave him an unusual look to my eye; though he talked carelessly on twenty matters of small interest, I could yet detect an undue energy in the tone of his voice, comparatively subdued as it was, and in his vehement manner of smoking, puffing out great clouds rapidly and filling the bowl afresh with hasty fingers. It would have vastly eased my mind had he made some reference to the morning. You felt as if the memory of it must be working in him like some deadly swift pulse, and I confess I could have shrunk from him at moments when I thought of the character of the source whence he drew the strength that enabled him to mask himself with what might well have passed for a mere company face.
When three bells, half-past nine, were struck, I made a move as though to go below.
‘Going to turn in?’ he asked.
‘It has been a long, tiring day,’ said I evasively.
‘A grand day,’ he exclaimed; ‘the one stirring, memorable day of our voyage. Come, I will follow you, and we will pledge it in a bumper before parting.’
We entered the cabin; it was deserted. Wilfrid asked where Miss Laura was, and the steward replied that he believed she was gone to bed.
‘She should be with us, Charles,’ cried my cousin, with a light of excitement in his eyes, his face flushed, though above it had looked marble in the starlight, and a half smile of malicious triumph riding his lips.
‘No, no,’ said I. ‘The poor child is tired. What is our drink to be, Wilf? I want to see you turned in, my dear boy.’
‘Pooh, pooh; hang turning in! I feel myself of forty-spirit power to-night, just in the humour, if I were a member, to go down to the House and terrify the old ladies in it who call themselves Sir Johns and Sir Thomases, and who wear swallow-tailed coats and broad-brimmed hats, with a passionate attack on the British Constitution.’
He called for brandy and seltzer. However, we had not been sitting twenty minutes when his mood changed; his dinner-party face darkened. He folded his arms and lay back in his chair, looking downwards with a gathering scowl upon his brow. I rose.
‘Good-night, Wilfrid,’ said I.
He viewed me with an absent expression, said ‘Good-night,’ and at once went, but in a mechanical way, governed by habit without giving his mind to the action, to his berth, at the door of which I saw him stand a moment whilst he gazed hard at the cabin abreast him; then rubbing his brow with the gesture of one who seeks to clear his brain, he disappeared.
Four bells were struck forward. I quietly stepped on deck, and whilst I stood looking into the binnacle Finn came up to me.
‘Shall we tarn to now, sir,’ said he, ‘and get this here melancholy job over?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘the sooner the better. Sir Wilfrid has gone to his cabin. Tell your people to be quick and secret.’
He trudged forward, and presently returned with Cutbill and another seaman. The three of them went below, leaving Crimp to get the gangway rigged and lighted. A couple of globular lamps, such as might be used for riding lights, were suspended against the bulwarks, and between them a seaman rested a grating of the length of a stretcher. The moon was rising at this moment on our starboard beam, an arch of blood defining the indigo-black line of the horizon there that on either hand of her went melting out into a blending of starladen sky, with the dark and gleaming ocean brimming to the yacht, vast as the heavens themselves looked. Presently up through the hatch rose the figures of Captain Finn and the two men, swaying under the weight of the canvas-shrouded form they bore. The watch on deck came aft and gathered about the gangway, where they glimmered like visionary creatures to the dull, yellow shining of the lamps. Face after face seemed to come twisting and wriggling out of the dusk—visions of hairy salts, rendered lifelike and actual by the dull illumination that glanced upon their shadowy lineaments. The wind filled the rigging with melancholy noises, there was a yearning sob in the sound of the water as it washed aft, broken and hissing serpent-like from the bow. The canvas rose dark, but it was now gathering to its loftier cloths a faint, delicate, pinkish tinge from the red moonbeam, though in a few minutes, when the planet had lifted her ill-shapen face clear of the black line of brine, all would be of a snow-white softness above us, and a sparkling line of bulwark-rail and glittering constellations in the skylight glass and a wake of floating and heaving silver rolling fan-shaped to us.
A couple of seamen caught hold of the grating and raised it level with the bulwarks, one end supported by the rail. The body was placed upon it, and ghostly it looked in that spectral commingling of starlight and lamplight and moonlight not yet brightening out of its redness—ghastly in the nakedness of its canvas cover, though, to be sure, there was no need at that hour to conceal it under a flag. Finn pulled a thin volume from his pocket and opened it close against one of the lanterns, peering into it hard and coughing hoarsely as though loath to begin. At last he mustered up courage and made a start. He pronounced many of the words oddly, and there was a deep sea-note in his delivery. I watched his long face twitching and working to his recital as he brought his eyes in a squint to the page with the lantern-light touching his skin into a hue of sulphur that made one think of it as the likeness of a human countenance wrought in yellow silk upon black satin. But the mystery of death was with us; it seemed to breathe—hot as the night was—in an ice-cold air off the dark surface of the sea, and a man’s sense of humour must have been of the featherweight quality of an idiot’s to flutter in the presence of the pallid, motionless bundle upon the grating, whose[245] chill, secret subduing inspirations were unspeakably heightened by the eyes of the sailors round about gleaming out of the weak glimmer of their countenances vaguely shaped by the rays of the oil-flames upon the obscurity, by the silver gaze of the countless equinoctial heaven surveying us over the yardarms and through the squares of the ratlines and amid the exquisite tracery of the gear, and by the steadfast watching of stars low down in the measureless dark distances of the west and north and south, as though they were the eyes of giant spirits standing on tiptoe behind the horizon to observe us, and by the slow soaring of the moon that was now icing her crimson visage with crystal, and diffusing a soft cloud of white light over the eastern sky with an edging already of brilliant glory under her upon a short length of the dark sea-line there that made the water in that direction look as though its boundary were beating in ivory foam against the wall of sky.
I was standing with my back to the companion hatch; my eyes were rooted upon the white form which in a few moments now would be tilted and sent flashing with a heavy cannon-ball at its feet into the black depths on which we were floating. The man, in life, had acted a scoundrel’s part, and had richly merited the end he had met; but he lay dead; his grave was this mighty wilderness of waters; not a hole in the earth to which those who mourned him could repair and say, pointing downwards, ‘What remains of him is here;’ but a tomb rivalling the heavens in immensity, a material eternity that would absorb him and his memory as though his form, waiting there to be launched, was but a drop of the dew that glittered in the moonshine upon the grating that supported him.
That bundle was a text to fill me with melancholy musings, and I was thinking of the man as I beheld him in the morning, worn indeed by shipwreck and privation, but stately, erect, soldierly; his cheek crimsoning to the blow that Wilfrid had dealt him; life and passion strong in him; when I was startled out of my thoughts by Finn ceasing to read. I glanced at him and observed that he was peering over the top of his book, goggling some object with eyes that protruded from their sockets. I looked to see what had called off his attention, and remarked a tall female figure attired in a light dress, but with her face concealed by a long dark veil, standing close beside the head of the grating, perfectly motionless, save for such movements as came to her by the swaying of the yacht. She had appeared amongst us with the stealthiness of a ghost, and she looked like one in that conflicting light, with the faint gleam of her eyes showing through the veil, and the stitched-up form on the grating to give a darker and more thrilling accentuation to her presence than she could have got from an empty grave or a ruptured coffin. The sailors backed away from her, shouldering one another into the gloom with much wiping of their leather lips upon the backs of their hands. I was startled on beholding her, but quickly rallied to a sense of deep disgust that possessed me on contrasting this[246] illustration of emotion with her language and treatment of Wilfrid that morning.
‘Proceed,’ I exclaimed to Finn. ‘Read on man, and shorten the service, too, if you can.’
He croaked out afresh, but the poor fellow was exceedingly nervous. The ceremony, so far as it had gone, had been chill, doleful, depressing enough before; but a character almost of horror to my mind now came into it with the tall, stately, motionless apparition that stood—scarce won by the lamplight and the moonlight from the shadowiness that clothed her with unreality—at the head of that ashen-tinctured length lying prone and resembling a hammock upon the grating. It was the moral her ladyship’s presence put into the occasion that made the ceremony all on a sudden so hideously gaunt, so wild, so inhuman, striking ice-like to the heart. For this she had quitted her child, as she believed, for ever; for this she had abandoned her husband, had pricked the bubble of her honour, extinguished the inspiration of her womanhood’s purest, truest, deepest, holiest feelings! What but an affrighting vision could that dead man wrapped in his sea-shroud convert her ladyship’s dream of passion and pleasure into! Something, one should think, to blind the very eyes of her soul. But, Lord, how I hated her then for the base dishonour she did herself by this subtle, sneaking attendance at the funeral of her shame with the ghost of it to slip with her to her cabin again, and to act, maybe, as a sentinel to her for the rest of her natural life, stalking close at her heels, so steadfast there as to make her presently dread to look behind her!
Finn’s croaking delivery ceased.
‘Overboard with it,’ he rumbled, for his gesture to tilt the grating had been unobserved by the two men who held it, or else not understood.
The sailors raised their arms; the glimmering bundle sped like a small cloud of smoke from the side to the accompaniment of the noise of a long creaming wash of water simmering aft from the bow, through which I caught the note of a half-stifled shriek from Lady Monson. She flung her hands to her face and reeled, as if she would fall. I sprang to her assistance, but on freeing her eyes and seeing who I was, she waved me from her with a motion of which the passionate haughtiness, disdain, and dislike were too strong for me to miss, confusing as the lights were. She then walked slowly aft.
I believed she was going below again, and said to Finn, ‘Shut the book. Make an end now. The man is buried, and thank God for it.’
Lady Monson, however, walked to the extreme end of the vessel, kneeled upon the little grating abaft the wheel, and overhung the taffrail, apparently gazing into the obscurity astern where the Colonel’s body was sinking and where the white wake of the yacht was glittering like a dusty summer highway running ivory-like[247] through a dark land on a moonlit night. I watched her with anxiety, but without daring to approach her. The sailors unhitched the lanterns and took them forward along with the grating.
I said to Finn: ‘I hope she does not mean to throw herself overboard.’
His head wagged in the moonlight. ‘Sir,’ he answered, ‘the likes of her nature ain’t quick to kill themselves. If she were the wife of the gent that’s gone, I’d see to it. But she’ll not hurt herself.’
Nevertheless, I kept my eye upon her. The awning was off the deck; the planks ran white as the foam alongside under the moon that was now brilliant, and all objects showed sharp upon that ground, whilst the flitting of the ebony shadows to the heave of the deck was like a crawling of spectral life. I spied the fellow at the glistening wheel turn his head repeatedly towards the woman abaft him, as though troubled by that wrapped, veiled, kneeling presence. Finn’s rough, off-hand indifference could not reassure me. The fear of death, all horror induced by the cold, moonlit, desolate, weltering waters upon which her eyes were fixed might languish in the heat of some sudden craze of remorse, of grief, of despair. There were shapes of eddying froth striking out upon the dark liquid movement at which she was gazing—dim, scarce definable configurations of the sea-glow which to her sight might take the form of the man whose remains had just sped from the yacht’s side; and God knows what sudden beckoning, what swift, endearing, caressing gesture to her to follow him she might witness in the apparition, real, sweet, alluring as in life to the gaze of her tragic eyes, which in imagination I could see glowing against the moon. It was with a deep sigh of relief that, after I had stood watching her at least ten minutes in the shadow of the gangway, I observed her dismount from the shadow of the grating and walk to the companion, down which she seemed to melt away as ghostly in her coming as in her going. Twenty minutes later I followed her, found the cabin empty, and went straight to bed.
It was pleasant to learn next morning that the breeze which had been slipping us nimbly through it since we had trimmed sail for our homeward bound run had not only blown steadily all night, giving us an average of some seven knots an hour, but had gathered a little increase of weight at sunrise, so that I awoke to as much life in the vessel in the resonant humming from aloft, the quick wash and eager seething of recoiling seas, the straining noises of strong[248] fastenings to the sloping of the spars as though the north-east trades were pouring full upon the starboard bow, and we were buzzing through the cool Atlantic parallels within a distance of soundings that would render talk about Southampton and arriving home reasonable.
For my part, ever since we had penetrated these ‘doldrums’ as they are called I was dreading the long dead calms of the frizzling belt where a catspaw is hailed in God’s name and where the roasting eye of the sun sucks out the very blue of the atmosphere till the heavens go down in a brassy dazzle to the ocean confines as though one were shut up in a huge, burnished bell with a white-hot clapper for light. My spirits were good as I sprang out of my bunk and made for the bath-room. It was not only that the fresh wind whistling hot through the open scuttle of my berth caused me to think of home as lying at last fairly over the bow instead of over the stern as it had been for weeks; the object of this trip, such as it was, had been achieved; there was nothing more to keep a look-out for; nothing more to hold one’s expectations tautened to cracking point. Everything that was material had happened on the preceding morning, and the toss of the Colonel’s body last night over the gangway by lantern-light with Lady Monson looking on was like the drop of the black curtain; it was the end of the tragedy; the orchestra had filed out, the lights were extinguished, and we could now pass into heaven’s invigorating air and live again the old easy life of commonplaces.
So ran my thoughts as I emerged from my berth with a very good appetite and made my way to the sparkling breakfast-table. I seated myself on a couch waiting for Wilfrid and Miss Laura; the stewards hung about ready to serve the meal. I called the head one to me and said, ‘Is there any chance of Lady Monson joining us at table, do you know?’
‘I think not, sir,’ he answered.
‘Who attends to her—I mean as regards her meals?’
‘Miss Jennings’ maid, sir. She told me this morning her ladyship’s orders are that a separate tray should be prepared for her for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Her breakfast was taken to her about ten minutes ago.’
‘So I may presume,’ said I, ‘that she finds herself pretty well this morning? And my cousin, steward?’
‘I was to tell you, sir,’ he answered, ‘that Sir Wilfrid will not come to table.’
‘How is he?’
‘He didn’t complain, sir; just said, “I’ll breakfast in my cabin this morning”!’
‘All right,’ said I, and the man retired.
There was nothing unusual in Wilfrid breakfasting in his cabin. I was glad to hear that he did not complain; as a rule he was very candid if in suffering; owned freely to whatever troubled him however trifling, and made much of it.
In a few minutes Miss Laura came from her berth. Her face[249] had the delicacy of look that in her at all events I took to express a troubled or sleepless night. Her eyelids were a little heavy; her lips wanted their dewy freshness of hue. Yet no woman, I thought, could ever show sweeter than she as she advanced and took my hand smiling up at me and subtly incensing the atmosphere with a flower-like fragrance that had nothing whatever to do with the scent-bottle. I told her that Wilfrid would not breakfast with us, and we seated ourselves.
‘He is well, I hope?’
‘Oh, I should think so, if I may judge from what the steward tells me. I’ll look in upon him after breakfast. Have you seen Lady Monson this morning?’
‘No,’ she answered, ‘I sent my maid with a message and the reply was that Lady Monson wishes to be alone.’
‘Now, Miss Jennings,’ said I, gently but with some emphasis ‘you must let nothing that Lady Monson does vex you. You have done your duty; she is on board this yacht; I shall grow fretful if I think you intend to waste a single breath of the sweetness of your heart upon the arid air of Madame Henrietta’s desert nature. I dare say you have scarcely closed your eyes all night through thinking about her.’
‘About her and other things.’
‘Why tease yourself? A sister is a sister only so long as she chooses to act and feel as one. It is indeed a tender word—a sweet relationship. But if a woman coolly cuts all family ties——’
She shook her head, smiling. ‘Your views are too hard, Mr. Monson. You would argue of a sister as you would of a wife. We must bear with the shame, the degradation, the wickedness of those we have loved, of those we still love spite of bitter repulse. There is no one, I am sure, would dare kneel down in prayer if it was believed that God’s mercy depended upon our own actions. All of us would feel cut off.’
Not all, I thought, looking at her, but I sat silent awhile, feeling rebuked. I was a young man then; I can turn back now, scarred as I am by many years of life’s warfare, and see that I was hard, too hard in those thoughtless days of mine; that knowing little or nothing of suffering myself, I knew little or nothing of the deep and wondrous vitality of human sympathy. You find many corridors in human nature when you enter, but sympathy is the only way in; and to miss that door is merely to go on walking round the edifice.
I ate for a little in silence and then said, ‘I suppose, as you have seen almost nothing of your sister, you are unable to form an opinion of her state of mind?’
‘She is naturally of a cold nature,’ she answered; ‘dispositions such as hers, I think, do not greatly vary, let what will happen to them. Though one knows not what passion, feeling, emotion may have its fangs buried in such hearts, yet suffering has to pass through too many wraps to find expression.’
I smiled. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I know what you mean. She is like a person who lies buried in half a dozen coffins; a shell, then lead, then oak and so on. Nothing but the last trumpet could influence the ashes inside.’
‘But why did you ask that question, Mr. Monson?’
‘Well,’ said I, ‘you know that we buried the Colonel last night?’
She started. ‘I did not know!’ she exclaimed.
‘Yes,’ I continued. ‘We slung a couple of lanterns and Finn read the service. Just before the body was launched your sister arrived, rising like a ghost amongst us.’
She looked greatly shocked. ‘Was Henrietta really present?’ she exclaimed. ‘How could she have known—what could the men have thought of her? What madness of bad taste!’
‘The forefinger follows the thumb,’ said I, ‘and when you come to the little finger you must begin again. All’s one with some people when they make a start. Am I too hard on human nature in saying this?’
But she merely exclaimed, as though talking to herself, ‘How could she be present? How could she be present?’
‘Well, now, mark what follows, Miss Jennings,’ said I; ‘when the body had vanished your sister walked right aft, kneeled upon the grating and in that posture of supplication continued to watch the dark waters for upwards of ten minutes. Meanwhile I was gazing at her from the gangway, where I stood in the dusk fidgeting exceedingly. For what was in my mind? Suppose she should fling herself overboard!’
Her violet eyes rested thoughtfully upon my face. ‘I should not have been afraid,’ she exclaimed, with a faint touch of scorn which made wonderfully sapid her voice that was low and colourless.
‘Of course you know your own sister,’ said I. ‘Finn took your view. I mentioned my misgiving, and his long head waggled most prosaically in the moonlight.’
‘Women who behave as my sister has, Mr. Monson,’ she exclaimed with the gravity of a young philosopher, ‘are too selfish, too cowardly, too much in love with themselves and with life to act as you seem to fear my sister might. They may go mad, and then to be sure there is an end of all reasoning about them; but whilst they have their senses they may be trusted so far as they themselves are concerned. In perfectly sane people many noble qualities go to impulses or resolutions which are deemed rash and impious by persons who falter over the mere telling of such deeds. My sister has not a single noble quality in her. She may poison the lives of others, but she will be extremely careful to preserve her own.’
‘Now if I had said that——’ said I.
‘Oh,’ she answered, with the little colour that had come into her cheeks fading out of them, ‘I will never reproach you for telling the truth.’
After breakfast I went to Wilfrid’s cabin and found him up and dressed, sitting in an easy chair reading his diary, which I took the book to be. He held the volume close to his face; his legs were crossed, his feet in slippers, his right hand grasped his big meerschaum pipe which was filled with yellow tobacco not yet lighted. The cabin window was open and the draperies of the handsome little apartment stirred to the pouring of the rich, hot ocean breeze through the orifice.
‘You look vastly comfortable, Wilf,’ said I. ‘Glad to find you well. But it must be a bit dull here though?’
‘Not at all,’ said he, putting down the book and lighting his pipe. ‘Sit and smoke with me.’
‘Why not on deck?’ I answered, sitting, nevertheless. ‘A wide view in hot weather takes the place of a cool atmosphere. The sight is sensible of the heat as well as other organs. It may be cooler down here in reality than it is under the awning above, but these cribbed and coffined bulkheads make it very hot to the eye, spite of that pleasant gushing of wind there.’
He quietly sucked at his pipe, looking at me through the wreathes of tobacco smoke which went up from his bowl. I lighted a cigar, furtively observing his face as I did so. He was pale: there was nothing novel in that, but I noticed an expression of anxiety in his eyes that was new to me: a look of sane concern as though some difficulty novel and surprising, yet not of a character to strike deep, had befallen him. I glanced at the breakfast tray that was upon the table near which he was seated and easily guessed by what remained that he had made a good meal. His manner was quiet, even subdued; no symptoms of the old jerkiness, of the odd probing gestures of head with a thrust of his mind, as it were, into one’s face as if his intellect were as short-sighted as his eyes. He was airily clothed in white, a coloured shirt wide open at the collar, and a small silk cap of a jockey pattern was perched upon his head.
‘Has Finn removed the five-guinea piece from the mainmast? said he?’
‘I don’t know, Wilf.’
‘I must send word to him to take charge of it, and to tell the men that the money will be distributed among them on our arrival. I shall be glad to get home.’
‘And so shall I, upon my word.’
‘The ceaseless motion of the sea,’ he continued, talking quietly and with a more sensible look in his face than I had witnessed in him since the hour of our start, ‘grows so distractingly monotonous after a time, that I can readily believe it affects weak heads. This trip has about exhausted my love of seafaring. I shall sell the “Bride.”’
I nodded.
‘How long should the run home occupy us?’ he asked.
‘Let us call it a month, or five weeks at the outside, for everybody’s sake,’ I answered.
He smoked for a minute in silence with a thoughtful face and then said, ‘Five weeks in one’s cabin is a long imprisonment.’
I imagined he referred to his wife, and that he was feeling his way in this roundabout fashion to talk about her. ‘There is no necessity to be imprisoned for five weeks,’ said I. ‘Your yacht is not an ocean liner full of passengers whose stares and whispers might indeed prove embarrassing. So far as I am concerned I am quite willing to promise very honestly never even to look. Miss Jennings is all tenderness and sweetness and sympathy; there could be nothing to found a plea for seclusion upon in her presence. As to the sailors,’ I continued, noticing without comprehending an air of bewilderment that was growing upon his face as I talked, ‘Jack meets with so many astonishments in his vocation that surprise and curiosity are almost lost arts with him. The crew will take one long thirsty stare; then turn their quids and give what passes aft no further heed whatever.’
‘I don’t follow you,’ he exclaimed, poising his pipe, with his eyes intently fixed on me; ‘what are you talking about?’
‘You were speaking of the tediousness of a five weeks’ imprisonment!’
‘Quite right,’ said he, ‘and tedious it is if it’s to last five weeks.’
‘But, my dear Wilfrid, I was endeavouring to point out that the imprisonment to which you refer is unnecessary; in fact, after last night——’ But here I suddenly bit my lip to the perception that it would be rash and unwise on my part to let him know that his wife had been present at Colonel Hope-Kennedy’s burial. ‘What I mean is,’ I continued, talking rapidly, ‘if it’s a mere question of sensitiveness or pride recoiling from observation, why not imitate the great Mokanna:
“O’er his features hung
The Veil, the Silver Veil which he had flung
In mercy there to hide from human sight
His dazzling brow till men could bear its light.”
In our case we have no dazzling brow, and consequently require no silver veils; but in Miss Laura’s wardrobe there should be——’
He was now gaping at me, and cried out, ‘Your brain wanders this morning, Charles. Do you mean that I should go veiled?’
‘You!’ I exclaimed; ‘certainly not. I am not talking of you.’
‘But I am talking of myself, though,’ he cried.
I looked at him with amazement. ‘You do not mean to say that you intend to imprison yourself in this cabin till we get home?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t imprison myself,’ he answered, ‘I am imprisoned.’
‘By whom, pray?’
‘Can’t you see?’
I ran my eyes round the cabin.
‘No, no!’ he shouted, ‘look at me. Don’t you perceive that I can’t get out? How am I to pass through that door?’
‘How are you to pass through that door?’ I exclaimed; ‘Why, by walking through it, of course. How else!’
‘Ay, and that’s just what I can’t do,’ said he with a melancholy shake of the head.
‘But why not, Wilfrid?’ I cried, scarcely yet understanding how it was with him.
‘Because,’ he answered petulantly, looking down himself, then at his arms and legs, ‘I am too big.’
I perceived now what had come to him, and felt so dismayed, so grieved, so pained, I may say to the very heart, that for some moments I was unable to speak. However, with a violent effort I pulled myself together, and lighting my cigar afresh in a demonstrative way, for the mere sake of obtaining what concealment I could get out of my gestures and my puffing of the tobacco clouds, I said, ‘Big you always were, Wilfrid; but never so big—and not now so big—as not to be able to pass through that door. See! let me go first; put your two hands just above my hips and you’ll follow me through as easily as reeving a rope’s end through the sheave hole it belongs to.’
I rose, but he waved me off with an almost frantic gesture. ‘My God, man!’ he shouted, ‘What is the use of talking? I could no more get through that door than I could pass through that porthole.’
‘But don’t you think we might manage to haul you through?’ said I.
‘You’d tear me to pieces,’ he answered. ‘Sit down, my dear fellow,’ he continued, speaking with an almost cheerful note in his voice, ‘it is a very grave inconvenience, but it must be met. This cabin is commodious, and with you and Laura to come and keep me company, and with the further solace of my pipe and books, why I shall be very nearly as well off as if I could get on deck. Besides,’ he added, lifting his finger and addressing me with that old air of cunning I have again and again referred to, made boyish and pathetic by the quivering of his eyelids and the knowing look his mouth put on, ‘even if I was not too much swelled to pass through that door,’ he glanced at it as if it were a living thing that demanded respectful speech from him, ‘I should never be able to get through the companion hatch.’
‘Well,’ said I, ‘it no doubt is as you say. A little patience and you will find yourself equal, I am sure, to leaving your cabin. If not, and you fear the idea of a squeeze, there is always your carpenter at hand. A few blows dealt at yonder bulkhead would make room for an elephant.’
‘Ay, that would be all very well,’ said he, ‘so far as this cabin is concerned. But would you have me order the carpenter to rip up the deck with leagues of Atlantic weather right ahead of us?’
I feigned to agree. No useful result could possibly follow any sort of reasoning with him whilst this extraordinary fancy possessed his brain. I watched him attentively to remark if he moved or acted as if his hallucination involved physical conditions, as if, in short he was sensible of the weight and unwieldiness of excessive growth in his body and limbs: for I remembered the case of a man I once heard of, who, believing himself to have grown enormously corpulent in a single night, acted the part of an immensely fat man by breathing pursily and with labour, by grasping his stomach as though it stood out a considerable distance ahead of him, and by other samples of behaviour which in his madness he might imagine properly belonged to the obese. But I could detect no conduct of this sort in Wilfrid outside that inspection of himself which I mentioned when he first told me that he had grown too big to quit his cabin.
I changed the subject and sat talking with him for a long half-hour. He asked no questions about his wife, nor as to the disposal of the Colonel’s body, nor reverted to the extent of the faintest implication to the incidents of the preceding day. Yet he conversed with perfect rationality; his manners were bland, with something of dignity in them; it seemed, indeed, as if the poor fellow’s craziness had localised itself in this new and astounding fancy of his being unable to squeeze his way through on deck, leaving his mind in all other directions clear and serene; yet mad as was the notion that had now seized him, I could not but secretly feel that there was more madness yet in his insensibility to what had happened, as though, indeed, the light of memory in him had been extinguished and he was conscious of nothing but what was actually passing before his eyes.
I held my peace on this new and astonishing craze, fancying that at any hour I might find him on deck and his delusion gone. At dinner, however, that day Miss Laura noticed his absence. My silence, I suppose, convinced her that there was something wrong with him. She questioned me and I told her the truth. Her eyes filled with sadness.
‘He grows worse,’ she said. ‘I fear he will never recover.’
‘This marriage,’ I answered, ‘on top of what was congenital in him, has proved too much. Have you seen your sister to-day?’
‘No.’
‘Does she intend to keep her cabin until we reach England?’
‘I cannot say. She declines to see me.’
‘Yet she has turned you out of your berth, and does not scruple, I suppose, to use everything that you possess. Well, we are a queer little ship, I must say; the husband self-imprisoned by fancy on one side, and a wife self-imprisoned by heaven knows what emotions on the other side; and both doors within kick of a foot from either threshold. It is a picture to encourage an ingenuous mind fired with matrimonial resolutions!’
‘Men are fools to get married!’ she exclaimed piquantly.
‘And women?’ said I.
‘Oh, it is the business of women to make men fools,’ she answered.
Her clear eye rested serenely on mine, and she spoke without archness or sarcasm.
‘I don’t think,’ said I, ‘that women make fools of men, but that it is men who make fools of themselves. Yet this I vow before all the gods: if I had married a woman like your sister and she had served me as she has served her husband, I should wish to be mad as Wilfrid is. He does not ask after her, seems to have utterly forgotten her and the fellow who was sent to his rest yesterday. Oh, how delightful! Why, you hear of women like Lady Monson driving their spouses into hideous courses of life, forcing them to search for oblivion in drink, gambling, and so on until they end as penniless miscreants, as broken-down purple-nosed rogues, and all for love, forsooth! But how is Wilfrid served? Some wild-eyed imagination slips into his brain, turns all the paintings to the wall, and with nimble hands falls to work to garnish the galleries inside his skull with tapestry hangings which engage his mind to the forgetting of all things else.’
‘But, Mr. Monson,’ cried she, ‘surely with some little trouble one might succeed in persuading him, whilst feigning to admit he has increased in size, that he is not too big to pass through his door.’
‘Let us pay him a visit,’ said I.
She at once rose. We had finished dinner some time. I had been chatting with her over such slender dessert as a yacht’s stores in those days supplied—figs, nuts, raisins, biscuits, and the like. The westering sun coloured the cabin with a ruby atmosphere amid which the wines on the table glowed in rich contrast with the snow-white damask and the icy sparkle of crystal, whilst red stars trembled in the silver lamps with a soft crimson lustre, flaking, as it seemed, upon the eye out of the mirrors. The humming wind gushed pleasantly through the open skylight and down the hatchway, and set the leaves of the plants dancing and the ferns gracefully nodding. To think of the woman for whom all this show was designed, for whom all these elegancies were heaped together, the mistress indeed of the gallant and beautiful little fabric that was bearing us with a pretty sauciness over this sea of sapphir, and under this reddening equinoctial heaven, sulking in her cabin, a disgraced, a degraded, a socially ruined creature, imprisoned by her own hand, and pride acting the part of turnkey to her! But Miss Jennings was making her way to Wilfrid’s cabin, and there was no leisure now for moralising.
We entered. The remains of the dinner my cousin had been served with were still upon his table, and I gathered that he had done exceedingly well. This did not look as though he suspected that eating had anything to do with his sudden astonishing growth. He had emptied one pint bottle of champagne, and another about[256] a quarter full stood at his elbow with a bumper, just poured out apparently, alongside it. He had attired himself in dress clothes again, and sat with an air of state and dignity in his armchair, toying with a large cigar not yet lighted.
‘How d’ye do, Laura, my dear? Sit down. Sit, Charles. There is plenty of room for slender people like you.’
I placed a chair for Miss Jennings and vaulted into Wilfrid’s bunk, for though the cabin was roomy in proportion to the burthen of the yacht, the accommodation was by no means ample owing to the furniture that crowded the deck. His high cheek-bones were flushed, a sort of glassiness coated his eyes, but this I readily ascribed to the champagne; the interior was hot, and Miss Laura cooled her sweet face with a black fan that hung at her waist. My cousin watched her uneasily as if he feared she would see something in him to divert her.
‘Do you feel now, Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘as if you could get on deck?’
‘Oh, certainly not,’ he answered warmly, ‘I wonder that you should ask such a question. Compare my figure with that door.’
He looked at Miss Laura with a shrug of his shoulders as though he pitied me.
‘Surely, Wilfrid,’ she exclaimed, ‘you could pass through quite easily, and without hurting yourself at all.’
‘Quite easily! Yes, in pieces!’ he cried scornfully. ‘But it is not that you are both blind. Your wish is to humour me. Please do nothing of the sort. What I can see, you can see. Look at this bulk.’ He put down his cigar to grasp his breast with both hands. ‘Look at these,’ he continued, slapping first an arm, then a leg. ‘It is a most fortunate thing that I should have broadened only. Had I increased correspondingly in height, I should not have been able to stand upright in this cabin,’ and he directed a glance at the upper deck or ceiling, whilst a shiver ran through him.
I thought now I would sound his mind in fresh directions, for though whilst his present craze hung strong in him it was not likely he would quit his cabin, yet if his intellect had failed in other ways to the extent I found in this particular hallucination he would certainly have to be watched, not for his own security only, but for that of all others on board. Why, as you may suppose, his craziness took the wildest and most tragic accentuation when one thought of where one was—in the very heart of the vast Atlantic, a goodly company of us on board, a little ship that was as easily to be made a bonfire of as an empty tar-barrel, with gunpowder enough stowed somewhere away down forward to complete in a jiffy the work that the flames might be dallying with.
‘You do not inquire after Lady Monson, Wilfrid,’ said I.
Miss Jennings started and stared at me.
‘Why should I?’ he answered coldly, and deliberately producing his little tinder-box, at which he began to chip. ‘I’ll venture to say she doesn’t inquire after me.’
I was astonished by the rationality of this answer and the air of intelligence that accompanied its delivery.
‘No, I fear not,’ said I, much embarrassed. ‘As she only came on board yesterday——’
‘Well?’ he exclaimed, finding that I paused.
‘Oh,’ said I with a bit of a stammer, ‘it just occurred to me you might have forgotten that she was now one of us, journeying home.’
‘Tut, tut!’ said he, waving his hand at me, but without turning his head. ‘Laura, you are looking after her, my dear?’
‘My maid sees that she has all she requires,’ answered the girl. ‘She declines to have anything to say to me—to meet me—to hear of me.’
He nodded his head slowly and gravely at her, and lowering his voice said, ‘Can she hear us, do you think?’
‘No,’ I exclaimed, ‘not through the two bulkheads, with the width of passage between.’
He smoked leisurely whilst he kept his eyes thoughtfully bent on Miss Laura. ‘My cousin,’ said he, addressing her as though I were absent, ‘has on more than one occasion said to me, “Suppose you recover your wife, what are you going to do with her?” I have recovered her and now I will tell you my intentions. Laura, you know I adored her.’ She inclined her head. ‘What term would you apply to a woman,’ he proceeded, ‘who should abandon a devoted husband that worshipped the ground she walked upon? who should desert the sweetest little infant’—I thought his voice would falter here, but it was as steady as the fixed regard of his eyes—‘that ever came from heaven to fill a mother’s heart with love? who should forfeit a position of distinction and opulence,—who should stealthily creep like a thief in the night from a home of beauty, of elegance, and of splendour; who should do all this for an end of such depravity that it must be nameless?’ his forefinger shot up with a jerk and his eyes glowed under the trembling of the lids. ‘What is the term you would apply to such a woman?’ he continued, now scowling and with an imperious note in his voice.
I guessed the word that was in his mind and cried, ‘Why, mad of course.’
‘Mad!’ he thundered violently, slapping his knee and breaking into a short, semi-delirious laugh. He leaned forward as though he would take Miss Laura into his strictest confidence, and putting his hand to the side of his mouth he whispered, ‘She is mad. We none of us knew it, Laura. My first act, then, when we reach home will be to confine her. But not a word, mind!’ He held his finger to his lips and in that posture slowly leaned back in his chair again, with a face painful with its smile of cunning and triumph.
I saw that the girl was getting scared; so without ado I dropped out of the bunk on to my feet.
‘An excellent scheme, Wilfrid,’ said I; ‘in fact the only thing to be done. But, my dear fellow, d’ye know the atmosphere here is just roasting. I’ll take Miss Jennings on deck for a turn, and when I am cooled down a bit I’ll look in upon you for another yarn for half-an-hour before turning in.’
‘All right,’ he exclaimed. ‘Laura looks as if she wants some fresh air. Send one of the stewards to me, will you, as you pass through the cabin? But mind, both of you—hush! Not a word; you understand?’
‘Trust us,’ said I, and sick at heart I took Miss Laura’s hand and led her out of the cabin. As I closed the door she reeled and would have fallen but for the arm I passed round her. I conducted her to a couch and procured a glass of water. The atmosphere here was comparatively cool with the evening air breezing down through the wide skylight, and she quickly recovered.
‘It is terrible!’ she exclaimed, pressing her fingers to her eyes and shaking her head. ‘I should fall crazy myself were I much with him. His sneers, his smiles, his looks, the boyish air of his face too! The thought of his misery, his injury, the irreparable wrong done him—poor Wilf, poor Wilf!’ Her tender heart gave way and she wept piteously.
When she was somewhat composed she fetched a hat and accompanied me on deck. The dusk down to the horizon was clear and fine, richly spangled to where the hard black line of the ocean ruled the firmament. On high sailed many meteors, like flying-fish sparking out of the dark velvet; some of them scoring under the trembling constellations a silver wake that lingered long on the eye and resembled a length of moon-coloured steam slowly settling away before the breath of a soft air. There were many shooting stars, too, without the comet-like grace of the meteoric flights; sharp, bounding sparkles that made one think of the flashing of muskets levelled at the ocean by visionary hands in the hovering, star-laden gloom. The wind was failing; the yacht was sailing with erect masts with a rhythmic swinging of the hollows of her canvas to the light weather rolls of the vessel on the tender undulations. It was like the regular breathing of each great white breast. The dew was heavy and cooled the draught as a fountain the atmosphere round about it. A little sleepy noise of purring froth came from the bows. All was hushed along the decks, though as the yacht lifted forward I could make out some figures pacing the forecastle, apparently with naked feet, for no footfall reached the ear.
‘Alas,’ said I, ‘the wind is failing. I dread the stagnation of these waters. I have heard of ships lying becalmed here for two and three months at a stretch; in all those hideous days of frying suns and steaming nights scarce traversing twenty leagues.’
‘We were becalmed a fortnight on the Line,’ said Miss Laura, ‘on our passage to England. It seemed a year. Everybody grew quarrelsome, and I believe there was a mutiny amongst the crew.’
‘Oh, I hate the dead calm at sea!’ I cried. ‘Yet I fear we are booked. Look straight up, Miss Jennings, you will behold a very storm of shooting stars. When I was in these waters, but much more west and east than where we now are, I took notice that whenever the sky shed meteors in any abundance a calm followed, and the duration of the stagnant time was in proportion to the abundance of the silver discharge. But who is that standing aft by the wheel there?’
My question was heard and answered. ‘It’s me—Capt’n Finn, sir.’
‘We’re in for a calm, I fear, Finn.’
‘I fear so, sir,’ he answered, slowly coming over to us. ‘Great pity though. I was calculating upon the little breeze to-day lasting to draw us out of this here belt. Them shooting stars too ain’t wholesome. Some says they signifies wind, and so they may to the norrards, but not down here. Beg pardon, Mr. Monson, but how is Sir Wilfrid, sir? Han’t seen him on deck all day. I hope his honour’s pretty well?’
‘Come this way, Finn,’ said I.
The three of us stepped to the weather rail, somewhat forward, clear of the ears of the helmsman.
‘Captain,’ said I, ‘my cousin’s very bad and I desire to talk to you about him.’
‘Sorry to hear it, sir,’ he answered in a voice of concern; ‘the heat’s a-trying him, may be.’
‘He refuses to leave his cabin,’ said I, ‘and why, think you? Because he has got it into his head that he has grown too broad to pass through the door or even to squeeze through that hatch there.’
‘Gor bless me!’ he exclaimed, ‘what a notion to take on. And yet it ain’t the first time I’ve heard of such whims. I was once shipmate with a man who believed his nose to be a knife. I’ve seen him a trying to cut up tobacco with it. There’s no arguing with people when they gets them tempers.’
‘But don’t you think, Captain Finn,’ said Miss Jennings, ‘that with some trouble Sir Wilfrid might be coaxed into coming on deck? If he could be induced to pass through his door he would find the hatch easy. Then, when on deck, confidence would return to him and his crazy notion leave him.’
‘Won’t he make the heffort, miss?’ inquired Finn.
I answered ‘No. He says that it would tear him to pieces to be dragged through.’
‘Then, sir,’ exclaimed the skipper with energy, ‘if he says it you may depend upon it he believes it, sir, and if he believes it then I dorn’t doubt that physical force by way of getting him out of his cabin would be the most dangerous thing that could be tried. It’s all the narves, sir. Them’s an arrangement fit to bust a man open by acting upon his imagination. Mr. Monson, sir, I’ll tell’ee what once happened to me. I had a fever, and when I recovered, my narves was pretty nigh all gone. I’d cry one moment like a[260] baby, then laugh ready to split my sides over nothen at all. I took on a notion that I might lay wiolent hands on myself if the opportunity offered. It wasn’t that I wanted to hurt myself, but that I was afeered I would. I recollect being in my little parlour one day. There was a bit of a sideboard agin the wall with a drawer in which my missus kep’ the table knives we ate with. The thought of them knives gave me a fright. I wanted to leave the room, but to get to the door I should have to pass the drawer where them knives were, and I couldn’t stir. Your honour, such was the state of my narves that the agony of being dragged past that door would have been as bad as wrenching me in halves. So I got out through the window, and it was a fortnight afore I had the courage to look into that parlour again.’
‘My father knew a rich gentleman in Melbourne,’ said Miss Jennings, ‘who lost his mind. He believed that he had been changed into a cat, and all day long he would sit beside a little crevice in the wainscot of his dining-room waiting for a mouse to appear.’
‘But when it comes to imaginations of this kind,’ said I, ‘one is never to know what is going to follow. Captain Finn, my cousin may mend—I pray God he will do so, and soon——’ ‘Amen,’ quoth Finn in his deepest note. ‘Meanwhile,’ I continued, ‘I am of opinion that he should be watched.’
‘You think so, sir!’ he exclaimed.
‘Why, man, consider where we are. Send your eye into that mighty distance,’ I cried, pointing to the black junction of scintillant gloom and the spread of ocean coming to us thence in ink. ‘Think of our loneliness here and the condition that a madman’s act might reduce us to. That is not all. Lady Monson, this young lady, and her maid sleep close to his cabin. Who shall conjecture the resolution that may possess a diseased brain on a sudden? Sir Wilfrid must be watched, Finn.’
‘I agree with you, sir,’ he answered thoughtfully, ‘but—but who’s to have the ordering of it? ’Tain’t for the likes of me, sir——’ He paused, then added, ‘He’s master here, ’ee know, sir.’
‘I’ll make myself responsible,’ I exclaimed; ‘the trouble is to have him watched with the delicacy that shall defy the detection of his most suspicious humour should he put his head out of his berth or quit it—which he is not likely to do yet. Of course an eye would have to be kept upon him from without. Name me two or three of your trustiest seamen.’
‘Why sir, there’s Cutbill, a first-class man; and there’s two others, Jonathan Furlong and William Grindling, that you may put your fullest confidence in.’
‘Then,’ said I, ‘I propose that these men should take a spell of keeping a lookout turn and turn about. The stewards would have been fit persons, but they are wanting in muscle. Let the man who keeps watch in the cabin so post himself that he may command the passage where Sir Wilfrid’s berth is. You or Crimp, according as[261] your watch comes round, will see that the fellow below, whoever he may be, keeps awake. Pray attend to this, Finn. I am satisfied that it is a necessary measure.’
‘I shall have to tell old Jacob the truth, sir, and the men likewise,’ said he, ‘and also acquaint the stewards with what’s wrong, otherwise they’ll be for turning the sailor that’s sent below out of the cabin.’
‘By all means,’ said I. ‘I’ll stand your lookout whilst you are making the necessary arrangements. But see that you provide your men with some ready and quite reasonable excuse for being in the cabin should Sir Wilfrid chance to come out during the night and find one of his seamen sitting at the table.’
‘Ay, ay, sir; that’s to be managed with a little thinking,’ answered Finn, and forthwith he marched towards the forecastle into the darkness there.
‘It is fortunate,’ I said to Miss Jennings, ‘that I am Wilfrid’s cousin. If I were simply a guest on board I question if Finn would do what I want.’
We fell to pacing the deck. Even as we walked the light breeze weakened yet, till here and there you’d catch sight of the gleam of a star in some short fold of black swell running with a burnished brow. The dew to the fluttering of the canvas aloft fell to the deck with the pattering sound of raindrops.
‘Oh,’ groaned I to Miss Laura, ‘for a pair of paddle-wheels!’
We stepped to the open skylight to observe if aught were stirring below, but gladly recoiled from the gush of hot air there rising with a fiery breath stale with the smell of the dinner table spite of the sweetness put into it by the flowers. Heavens, how my very heart sickened to the slopping sounds of water alongside lifting stagnantly and sulkily, melting out into black ungleaming oil! We seated ourselves under the fanning spread of mainsail, talking of Wilfrid, of his wife, of features of the voyage, until little by little I found myself slowly sliding into a sentimental mood. My companion’s sweet face, glimmering tender and placid to the starlight, came very near into courting me into a confession of love. The helmsman was hidden from us, we seemed to be floating alone upon the mighty shadow that stretched around. A sense of inexpressible remoteness was inspired by the trembling of the luminaries and the sharp shooting of the silver meteors as though all the life of this vast hushed universe of gloom were up there, and we had come to a pause upon the very verge of creation, with no other vitality in the misty confines save what the beating of our two hearts put into them.
On a sudden she started and said, ‘See! there is my sister.’
The figure of Lady Monson rose, pale and veiled, out of the companion hatch. She did not observe us, and approached the part of the deck where we were seated, courted haply by the deeper dye the shadow of the mainsail put into the atmosphere about it. I was struck by the majesty of her gait, by the tragic dignity of[262] her carriage as she advanced, taking the planks with a subtlety of movement that made her form look to glide wraith-like. The sweet heart at my side shrank with so clear a suggestion of alarm in her manner that I took her hand and held it. Lady Monson drew close—so close without seeing us that I believed she was walking in her sleep, but she caught sight of us then and instantly flung, with an inexpressible demeanour of temper and aversion, to the other side of the deck, which she paced, going afterwards to the rail and overhanging it, motionless as the quarter-boat that hung a little past her.
‘She frightens me!’ whispered Laura; ‘ought I to join her? Oh, cruel, cruel, that she should hate me so bitterly for her own acts!’
‘Why should you join her? She does not want you. The heat has driven her on deck, and she wishes to muse and perhaps moralise over the Colonel’s grave. Why are you afraid of her?’
‘Because I am a coward.’
Just then Finn came along. He went up to Lady Monson and I saw his figure stagger against the starlight when he discovered his mistake. He peered about and then came over to us, breathing hard and polishing his forehead.
‘Nigh took the breath out of my body, sir,’ he exclaimed in a hoarse whisper; ‘actually thought it was your honour, so tall she be. Well, I’ve arranged everything, sir, and a lookout’ll be established soon arter the cabin light’s turned down.’
Laura suddenly rose and wished me good-night. I could see that Lady Monson’s presence rendered her too uneasy to remain on deck, so I did not press her to stay, though I remember heartily wishing that her ladyship was still on board the ‘’Liza Robbins.’ She continued to hold her stirless posture at the bulwark rail as though she were steadily thinking herself into stone. But for her contemptuous and insolent manner of turning from us, I believe I should have found spirit enough to attempt a conversation with her. It was not until four bells that she rose suddenly from her inclined attitude as though startled by the clear echoing chimes. Past her the sky was dimly reddening to the moon whose disc still floated below the horizon, and against the delicate almost dream-like flush, I perceived her toss up her veil and press her hands to her face. She then veiled herself afresh, came to the companion and disappeared. Was it remorse working in her, or grief for her foundered colonel, or some anguish born of the thought of her child? Easier, I thought, to fathom with the sight the mysteries of the ooze of the black, vaporous-looking surface that our keel was scarce now wrinkling than to penetrate the secrets of a heart as dark as hers!
Half-an-hour later I quitted the deck, and as I passed through the cabin nodded to Cutbill, who sat awkwardly and with a highly embarrassed air with his back upon the cabin table, commanding the after cabins—a huge salt, all whisker, wrinkles, and muscle.
I was up and about a great deal during the night. It was not only that the heat murdered sleep; there was something so ominous in the profound stillness which fell upon our little ship that the mind found itself weighed down as with a sense of misgiving, a dull incommunicable dread of approaching calamity. Of the dead calm at sea I was by no means ignorant; in African and West Indian waters I had tasted of the delights of this species of stagnation over and over again. One calm, I remember, came very close to realising Coleridge’s description, or rather the description that the poet borrowed from the narrative of old Sir Richard Hawkins preserved in the foxed and faded pages of the Rev. Samuel Purchas. The water looked to be full of wriggling fiery creatures burning in a multitude of colours till the surface of the sea resembled a vast, ghastly prism reflecting the lights of some hellish principality, deep sunk in the dark brine. But I never recollect the ocean until this night as without some faint heave or swell; yet after the weak draught of air had utterly died out, somewhere about midnight, the yacht slept upon a bosom as stirless as the surface of a summer lake. There was not the slightest movement to awaken an echo in her frame, to run a tremor through her canvas, to nudge the rudder into the dimmest clanking of its tiller chains. The effect of such a hush as this at sea is indescribable. On shore, deep in the country, far distant from all hum of life, the stillness of night is a desired and familiar condition of darkness; it soothes to rest; whatever vexes it is a violence; the sweeping of a gale through hissing and roaring trees, the thunder of wind in the chimney, the lashing of the windows with hail and rain, the red belt of lightning to whose view the bedroom glances in blood to the eye of its disturbed occupant; all this brings with it an element of fear, of something unusual, out of keeping, out of nature almost. But at sea it is the other way about. ’Tis the dead calm that is unnatural. It is as though the mighty forces of heaven and ocean had portentously sucked in their breath in anticipation of the shock of conflict, as a warrior fills his lungs to the full and then holds his wind whilst he waits the cry of charge.
I tried to sleep, but could not, and hearing one o’clock struck on the forecastle, dropped out of my bunk for ten minutes of fresh air on deck. Cutbill sat with his back against the table; the small flame of the lamp that hung without the least vibration from the cabin ceiling gleamed in the sweat-drops that coated his face as though oil had been thrown upon him. I said softly, pausing a moment to address him: ‘A wonderfully still night, Cutbill.’
‘Never remember the like of it, sir,’ he answered in a whisper that had a note of strangling in it, with his effort to subdue his natural tempestuous utterance.
‘All quiet aft?’
‘As a graveyard, sir.’
‘In case Sir Wilfrid Monson should look out and see you, what excuse for being here has Captain Finn provided you with?’
‘I’m supposed to be watching the bayrometer, sir. If Sir Wilfrid steps out I’m to seem to be peering hard at that there mercury, then to go on deck as if I’d got something to report.’
‘Oh, that’ll do, I dare say,’ I exclaimed. ‘He may wonder but that must not signify. Heaven grant, Cutbill, that I am unnecessarily nervous; but we’re a middling full ship; it is the right sort of night, too, to make one feel the hugeness of the ocean and the helplessness of sailors when deprived of their little machinery for fighting it; and what I say is, a misgiving under such circumstances ought to serve us as a conviction—so keep a bright look-out, Cutbill. Nothing is going to happen, I dare say; but our business is to contrive that nothing shall happen.’
The huge fellow lifted his enormous hand very respectfully to his glistening forehead, and I passed on to the deck.
The moon shone brightly and her reflection lay upon the sea like a league-long fallen column of silver, with the ocean going black as liquid pitch to the sides of the resplendent shaft. Not a wrinkle tarnished that prostrate pillar of light; not the most fairy-like undulation of water put an instant’s warping, for the space of a foot, into it. I set the mainmast head by a star and watched it, and the trembling, greenish, lovely point of radiance hung poised as steadfastly on a line with the truck as though it were some little crystal lamp fixed to an iron spike up there.
I spied Jacob Crimp near the wheel, but I had come up to breathe and not to talk. I desired to coax a sleepy humour into me and guessed that that end would be defeated by a chat with the surly little sailor, with whom I rarely exchanged a few sentences without finding myself drifting into an argument. So I lay over the rail striving to cool my hot face with the breath off the surface of the black profound that lay like a sheet of dark, ungleaming mirror beneath. On a sudden I heard a great sigh out in the gloom. It was as though some slumbering giant had fetched a long, deep, tremulous breath in a dream. I started, for it had sounded close, and I looked along the obscure deck forward as if, forsooth, there was any sailor on board whose respiration could rise to such a note as that! In a moment I spied a block of blackness slowly melting out like a dye of ink upon the indigo of the water with the faint flash of moonlight off the wet round of it. A grampus! thought I; and stared about me for others, but no more showed, and the prodigious midnight hush seemed to float down again from the stars like a sensible weight with one wide ripple from where the great[265] fish had sunk, creeping like a line of oil to the yacht’s side and melting soundlessly in her shadow.
This grave-like repose lasted the night through, and when early in the morning, awakened by the light of the newly risen sun, I mounted to the deck, I found the ocean stretched flat as the top of a table, the sky, of a dirty bluish haze, thickening down and merged into the ocean line so that you couldn’t see where the horizon was, save just under the sun where the head of the misty white sparkle in the water defined the junction. It baffled and bothered the sight to look into the distance, so vaporous and heavy it all was, with a dull blue gleam here and there upon the water striking into the faintness like a sunbeam into mist, and all close to, as it seemed, though by hard peering you might catch the glimmer of the calm past the mixture of hazy light and hues where sea and sky seemed to end.
Jacob Crimp had charge. I asked him if all had been quiet below in the cabin.
‘Ay,’ he answered, ‘I’ve heard of nothen to the contrairy. Her ledship came on deck during the middle watch and had a bit of a yarn with me.’
‘Indeed!’ said I.
‘Yes, she scared me into a reg’lar clam. I was standing at the rail thinking I see a darkness out under the moon as if a breath of wind were coming along, and a woice just behind me says, “What’s your name?” Nigh hand tarned my hair white to see her, so quiet she came and her eyes like corposants.’
‘What did she talk about?’ said I in a careless way.
‘Asked what the sailor was a-sitting in the cabin for. “To prevent murder being done,” says I. “Murder?” says she. “Yes,” says I, “and to prewent this wessel from being set on fire and blown to yellow blazes,” says I, “for God knows,” says I, “what weight of gunpowder ain’t stowed away forrard.” “Who’s a-going to do all this?” says she; so I jist told her that Sir Wilfrid had been took worse, and that the order had come forward that the cabin was to be watched.’
‘What did she say to that?’ I exclaimed.
‘Why, walked to t’other side of the deck and sot down and remained an hour, till I reckoned that when she went below she must ha’ been pretty nigh streaming with dew.’
‘What do you think of the weather, Mr. Crimp?’
‘It’s agin nature,’ he answered. ‘Like lying off Blackwall for smoothness. ’Taint going to last, though. Nothing that’s agin nature ever do, whether it’s weather, or a dawg with two tails, or a cat with eight legs.’
‘I wish you were a magician,’ said I, ‘I’d tassel your handkerchief for a strong breeze. A roasting day with a vengeance, and the first of a long succession, I fear.’
At breakfast I told Miss Laura of Lady Monson’s visit on deck in the middle watch, and the mate’s blunt statement to her. ‘It[266] was a mighty dose of truth to administer,’ said I. ‘She will pass some bad quarters of an hour, I fear. Think of old Jacob talking to her of murder and fire, and explosions unto yellow blazes, whatever that may mean, with her husband sleeping right abreast of her cabin and armed, as she must know.’
‘Has he those pistols?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘I gave the case to one of the stewards to return to him, and now I am sorry I did so.’
‘Of course Henrietta will be frightened,’ she exclaimed. ‘I do not envy her in her loneliness. Why should she refuse to see me? I easily understand her objection to showing herself on deck by daylight; but I am her sister; I could sit with her; I could be company for her, win her, perhaps,’ she said with a wistful look, ‘to something like a gentle mood.’ She sighed deeply and continued: ‘Wilfrid scared me yesterday. There was that in his face which shocked me, but I could not explain what it was. Yet I am not the least bit afraid he will commit any deed of violence. Let him be twenty times madder than he now is, his heart is so tender, his spirit so boylike, pure, honourable, there is so much of sweetness and affection in his nature that I am certain his cruellest delirium would be tempered by his qualities.’
I was grateful to her for thus speaking of my poor cousin, but I could not agree with her. The qualities she pinned her faith to had suffered him at all events to shoot Colonel Hope-Kennedy and to make nothing of the man’s death. Yet, thought I, looking at her, seeing how this sweet little creature values, and to a large extent understands him, what devil’s influence was upon the loving, large-hearted, childlike man when he chose the other one for his wife? But, fond of him and sorry for him as I was, I could not have wished it otherwise—for my sake at all events; though on her part it would have made her ‘her ladyship’ and found her a husband whose brain I don’t doubt might year by year have grown stronger in the cheerful and fructifying light of her cordial, sympathetic, radiant character.
I looked in upon him after breakfast. Miss Laura wished to accompany me, but I advised her to delay her visit until I had ascertained for myself how he did. He was lying in his bunk, a large pipe in his mouth, at which he pulled so heartily that his cabin was dim with tobacco smoke. His cheek was supported by his elbow and his eyes fixed upon his watch, a superb gold time-keeper that dangled at the extremity of a heavy chain hitched to a little hook screwed into the deck over his head. On the back of this watch were his initials set in brilliants, and these gems made the golden circle show like a little body of light as it hung motionless before his intent gaze. He did not turn his head when I opened the door, then looked at me in an absent-minded way when I was fairly entered.
‘Ah!’ he exclaimed languidly, ‘it is you, Charles. You promised to sit with me awhile last night.’
‘I did, but the heat below was unendurable. It is no better now. The temperature of this cabin must be prodigious. What calculations are you making?’ said I.
‘None,’ he answered. ‘I have slung the watch to observe if there is any movement in the yacht. She is motionless. Mark it. There is not a hairbreadth of vibration. We are afloat, of course?’ he said, suddenly looking at me.
‘I hope so,’ said I. ‘Afloat? Why, what do you suppose, Wilf? That we’ve gone to the bottom?’
‘It would be all one for me,’ he answered with a deep sigh, and then applying himself to his pipe again with a sort of avidity that made one think of a hungry baby sucking at a feeding bottle. He clouded the air with tobacco smoke and said: ‘I am heartily weary of life.’
‘And why?’ cried I: ‘because we are in a dead calm with the equator close aboard. The very deep is rotting. A calm of this kind penetrates through the pores of the skin, enters the soul and creates a thirsty yearning for extinction. Being younger than you. Wilf, I give myself another twelve hours, and then, if no breeze blows, I shall, like you, be weary of life and desire to die.’
‘It is easily managed,’ said he.
‘Yes,’ cried I, startled, ‘no doubt; but the weather may change, you know.’ And not at all relishing his remark nor the looks that accompanied it, I seized my hat and fell to fanning the atmosphere with the notion of expelling some of the tobacco smoke through the open porthole.
‘I am of opinion,’ said he, puffing and dropping his words alternately with the clouds he expelled whilst he kept his eyes fixed upon his watch, ‘that, spite of the arguments of the divines, life is a free gift to us to be disposed of as we may decide. Nature is invariably compensative. We are brought into this world without our knowledge, and therefore, of course, without our consent, d’ye see, Charles,’ and here he rolled his eyes upon me, ‘and by way of balancing this distracting obligation of compulsory being, nature says you may do what you like with existence: keep it or part with it.’
‘I say, Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘there are surely more cheerful topics for an equinoctial dog-day than this you have lighted on. Don’t speculate, my dear fellow; leave poor old nature alone. Take short views, and let the puzzling distance unfold and determine itself to your approach. It is the wayfarers who decline to look ahead, who whistle as they trudge along the road of life. The melancholy faces are those whose eyes are endeavouring to see beyond the horizon towards which they are advancing. Tell me now—about this cabin door of yours. My dear fellow, it must be big enough this morning to enable you to pass through; so come along on deck, will you, Wilfrid?’
‘Damn it, how blind you are!’ he exclaimed.
‘No, I’m not,’ said I.
‘D’ye mean to say that you can’t see what’s happened to me since we last met?’
‘What now, Wilfrid?’
‘What now?’ he shouted. ‘Why, man, I can’t stand upright.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Because I’m too tall for this cabin,’ he answered in a voice of passion and grief.
‘Pray when did you find that out?’ said I.
‘On rising to dress myself this morning,’ he answered, ‘I was obliged to clothe myself in my bunk. What a dreadful blow to befall a man! I can’t even quit my bed now, and everything I want must be handed to me.’
Well, well! thought I; God mend him soon. Hot as it was, a chill ran through me to the crazy, wistful, despairful look he directed at me, and I was oppressed for a moment with the same sickness of heart that had visited me during my interview with him on the preceding day.
‘I had resolved to sell the “Bride,”’ said he mournfully, putting his pipe into a shelf at the back of him and folding his hands, which seemed to me to have grown thin and white during the past few days, upon his breast, ‘but I shan’t be able to do so now.’ I was silent. ‘She will have to be broken up,’ he added.
‘Nonsense!’ I exclaimed.
‘But I say yes!’ he suddenly roared; ‘how the devil else am I to get out of her?’
‘Oh, I see!’ I answered soothingly, ‘I forgot that. But, Wilf, since you’re too big to use this cabin, for the present only, for I am certain you will dwindle to your old proportions before long, don’t you think you ought to have an attendant constantly with you, some one at hand sitting here to wait upon you?’
‘Why, yes,’ said he, ‘no doubt of it. I am almost helpless now. But I’ll not have that rascal Muffin.’
‘No, no,’ said I. ‘Nor would the stewards make the sort of servants you want. If I were in your place I should like to be waited on by a couple of jolly hearty sailors, fellows to take turn and turn about in looking after me, chaps with their memories full of long yarns, unconventional, sympathetic, no matter how rough their manners, agile, strong as horses, with lively limbs, used to springing about. One or two such men are to be met forward amongst your crew.’
‘A good idea,’ he cried. ‘Gad! after my experiences of Muffin I’d rather be waited upon by the tarriest of tarry tarpaulins than one of your sleek, soft-stepping, trained rogues who come and ask you for a situation with an excellent character in one pocket from their late master, and in the other the contents of his dressing-case. Ha, ha, ha!’ and here he delivered one of his short roars of laughter.
I remained conversing with him until an hour was gone. Now that he had put his pipe down the atmosphere of the cabin grew[269] somewhat endurable, yet the heat was extraordinarily great, and due, so far as one’s sensations went, not more to the temperature than to the incredible motionlessness of the yacht, so that there was not the faintest stir of air in the porthole. I spoke of Lady Monson, fancying that the thought of her might help to steady his mind and bring him away from his crazy notions of growth and expansion; but he would not talk of her; as regularly as I worked round to the subject of her ladyship, as regularly was he sliding off into some other topic. Sometimes I’d think that feeling had utterly changed in him; that there had grown up in him for the woman whom he had again and again vowed to me he adored, a loathing to which his innate good taste forbade him to give expression. How it would be if they should meet I could not tell. Her black tragic eyes might not have lost their fascination, nor her shape of beauty and dignity its power of delighting and enamouring him. But certainly, as we sat conversing, the sort of cowering air that accompanied his abrupt changing of the subject every time I mentioned his wife’s name was strongly suggestive of disgust and aversion. He talked very sensibly save about his dimensions, but I took notice in him of a hankering after the topic of suicide. Several times he tried to bring me into an argument upon it.
‘Am I to be told,’ he said, ‘that a man’s life is not his own? If not, to whom does it belong, pray?’
‘To heaven,’ I responded sullenly.
‘Prove it,’ he sneered.
‘Oh, ’tis too plain and established a fact to need proving,’ said I.
‘If a man’s life is his own,’ he cried, ‘who the deuce in this world has the right to hinder him from doing what he will with it?’
‘Wilf, if this goes on,’ said I, ‘we shall be landed in a religious controversy; a thing unendurable even under the sign of the frozen serpent, but down here with a thermometer at about 112° in the cabin, no ice nearer than 56° north?—see here, my dear cousin, get you small again as soon as you can, back to your old size, join Laura and myself at the table afresh, walk the decks with us, taste the fragrance of a cigar upon the cool night air; realise that your little one is at home waiting for you, and that on your return you will have plenty of homely occupation in looking after those excellent improvements in your property which you were telling me the other day you had in your mind. This sudoriferous speculation as to whether people have a right to hinder a man from taking his life will then exhale.’
And so I would go on chatting, talking him away, so to speak, from this gloomy subject which his condition rendered depressing and most uncomfortably significant in his mouth.
However, my visit to him had led to one stroke of good, for on quitting him I at once went to Finn, who was on deck, and told him how Sir Wilfrid had fallen into my scheme and was for having a couple of sailors to wait upon him, one of whom should be constantly in his cabin.
‘You must be plain with the fellows, captain,’ said I; ‘tell them that Sir Wilfrid’s craze grows upon him and that he must be narrowly watched, but with tact.’
‘I’ll see to it, sir,’ said he; ‘can’t do better than Cutbill and Furlong, I think. They’re both hearty chaps, chock-a-block with lively yarns, and they’ve both got good tempers. But dorn’t his honour get no better then, sir?’
‘No,’ said I.
‘Dorn’t he feel as if he was a-coming back to his old shape, sir?’
‘On the contrary,’ I answered, ‘yesterday he had only broadened, but this morning he feels so tall that he can’t stand upright.’
‘Well to be sure!’ cried the worthy fellow, with his long face working all over with concern and anxiety. ‘It’s all her ladyship’s doing. It’s all her caper-cutting that’s brought him to this. Such a gentle heart as he has, too, and a true gentleman through and through him when his mind sits square in his head? But lor’ bless me, sir, what did he want to go and get married for? ’Taint as if he wanted a home, or a gal with money enough to keep him. Not that it’s for me to say a word agin marriage, for my missus has always kept a straight helm steady in my wake ever since I took her in tow. But all the same, I’m of opinion that matrimony is an institootion that don’t fit this here earth. It’s a sort of lock-up; a man’s put into a cell along with a gal. If she’s a proper kind of gal, why well and good. The window dorn’t seem barred and ye don’t take much notice of your liberty being gone; but if she tarns out to be of her ladyship’s sort, why there’s nothen to do but to sing out through the keyhole for a rope to hang yourself with, or, if ye ain’t got sperret enough for that remedy, to hang her with.’
The delivery of this harangue seemed to ease his mind, and he went forward with a face tolerably composed to give instructions to the two men who were to serve as companions or, to put it bluntly, as keepers to Wilfrid.
The weather held phenomenally silent and breathless. Just before lunch I went right aft, where I commanded the length of the vessel, and steadfastly watched her, and though I had my eye upon the line of her jibboom I did not see that the end of the spar lifted or fell to the extent of the breadth of a finger-nail. The sole satisfaction that was to be got out of this unparalleled condition of stagnation was the feeling that it could not possibly last. The dim and dirty blue of the sea went rounding not above a mile distant into a like hue of atmosphere, with a confused half-blinded vagueness of sky overhead that did not seem to be higher up than twice the height of our masts, and the appearance made you think of sitting in a glass globe sunk a fathom or two under water with the light sifting through to you in a tarnished, misty, ugly azure. A strange part of it was that though the sky was cloudless the atmosphere was so thick you could watch the sun, which hovered[271] shapeless as a jelly-fish almost overhead, for a whole minute at a time, without inconvenience; yet his heat bit fiercely for all that; there was a wake, too, under him, flakes of muddy yellow-like sheets of a ship’s sheathing scaling one under another, as though they were going to the bottom in a procession. If you put your hand upon the rail clear of the awning you brought it away with a stamp of pain. I touched the brass binnacle hood by accident and bawled aloud to the burn which raised me a blister on the side of my hand that lasted for three days. A sort of impalpable steam rose from the very decks, so that if a man stood still a moment you saw his figure trembling in it like the quivering of an object beheld in clear running water. And how am I to express that deeper quality of heat which seemed to come into the atmosphere with the smell of the blistering of paint along the yacht’s sides?
Yet there was no fall in the mercury, no hint above or below to indicate a change at hand. Close alongside the burnished water lay clear as crystal and gave back every image with almost startling brilliance. I remember looking over and seeing my face in the clear profound as distinctly as ever I had viewed it in a mirror. It lay like a daguerreotype there. It was of course as deep down as I was high above the surface, and I protest it was like looking at one’s self as though one floated a drowned man.
It was the right kind of day for a plunge, and I pined for a swim, for the delight of the cool embrace of the glass-clear brine. But the skipper would not hear of it.
‘To the first splash, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘there’d sprout up a regular crop of black fins. It isn’t because there’s nothing showing now that there ain’t a deal more than I for one ’ud care to see close at hand. No sir; be advised by me; don’t you go overboard.’
‘Oh, captain,’ said I, ‘I’ve been a sailor in my day and of course know how to obey orders. But I’ve cruised a good deal in my time in John Sharkee’s waters, and with all due deference to you I must say that whenever there are sharks about one or more will be showing.’
‘Sorry to contradict ye, sir, but my answer’s no to that,’ he replied. ‘Tell ’ee what I’ll do, sir—there’s nothen resembling a shark hanging round now, is there?’
We both stared carefully over the water, and I said no.
‘Well, now, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ll bet ’ee a farden’s worth of silver spoons that I’ll call up a shark to anything I may choose to chuck overboard.’
‘Make it a pennyworth of silver spoons,’ said I, ‘and I’ll bet.’
‘Done,’ said he with a grin, and straightway walked forward. After a little he returned with a canvas-bag stuffed full of rubbish, potato-parings, yarns, shavings enough to make it floatable, and the like. He hitched the end of a leadline to it, jumped on to the taffrail clear of the awning, and whirling it three or four times, sent it speeding some distance away on the quarter. It fell with a splash,[272] and the blur it made upon the flawless surface was for all the world like the impress of a damp finger upon a sheet of looking-glass. He towed it gently, and scarce had he drawn in three fathoms of the line when a little distance past the bag up shot the fin of a shark with a gleam off its black wetness as though it were a beer-bottle. He hauled the bag aboard and the fin disappeared.
‘Are they to be egg-spoons or dessert-spoons, Finn?’ said I, laughing. ‘By George, I shouldn’t have believed it, though. But it’s always so. Let a man fancy that he knows anything to the very top of it, and he’s sure to fall in with somebody who has a trick above him.’
But it was too hot for shark-fishing, let alone the mess of a capture on our ivory-white planks. At first I was for decoying the beasts to the surface and letting fly at them with one of the muskets below, but Finn suggested that the firing might irritate Sir Wilfrid. What was to be done but lie down and pant? Miss Laura was so overcome by the heat that for once she proved bad company. At lunch she could not eat; she was too languid to talk.
‘Just the afternoon for a game of draughts,’ said I, in playful allusion to the want of air.
She waved away the suggestion with a weak movement. In fact she was so oppressed that when I told her about Wilfrid’s new phase of growth she could only look at me dully as though all capacity of emotion lay swooning in her heart. I sat by her side fanning her, whilst the perspiration hopped from my forehead like parched peas.
‘Oh,’ cried the little creature, ‘how long is this calm going to last? What would I give for an English Christmas day to tumble down out of the sky upon us, with its snow and hail.’
‘Let us go on deck,’ said I; ‘I am certain it is cooler up there.’
We mounted the steps, but she was scarcely out of the companion hatch when she declared it was a great deal hotter above than below, and down she went again. After all, thought I, Sir Wilfrid and his wife are as well off in their cabins as though they had permitted themselves to wander at large about the yacht. Yet it seemed a roasting existence to my fancy for the self-made prisoners when I glanced aft and thought of the size of their cabins, with not air enough to stir a feather in the open ports, and Cutbill’s huge form in Wilfrid’s berth to give as distinct a rise to the thermometer there as though a stove had been introduced and a fire kindled in it.
All day long it was the same smoky, confused blending of misty blue water and heaven shrouding down overhead and closing upon us, with the sea like a dish of polished steel set in the midst of it, bright as glass where we lay, then dimming into a bluish faintness in the atmospheric thickness at its confines, and the sun a distorted face of weak yellow brightness staring down as he slided westwards with an aspect that made him look as though he were some newly-created luminary. At about six o’clock he hung over[273] the sea line glowing like a huge live cinder, and the air was filled with his smoky crimson glare that went sifting and tingling into the distance till one was able to see twice as far again, a red gleam of sea opening past the dimness and a delicate liquid dye of violet melting down, as one might have thought, from the highest reaches of the heavens into the eastern atmosphere.
‘Hillo!’ cried I to Jacob Crimp, who was leaning over the side with his face purple with heat and full of loathing of the weather; ‘direct your eyes into the south, will ye, and tell me what you see there?’
He turned with the leisurely action peculiar to merchant-sailors, lifted the sharp of his hand to his brow and peered sulkily in the direction which I had indicated.
‘Clouds,’ said he. ‘Is that what ye mean?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and a very noble and promising coast of them, too, as I believe we shall be finding out presently when the change which I hope their brows are charged with shall have clarified the air.’
In fact I had just then caught sight, away down in the south amidst the haziness there, of some bronze streaks stretching from south-east to south-west, with here and there dashes of exceedingly faint shadow of the colour of flint. Much looking was not needful; it was quickly to be seen that right astern of our course, though as the yacht lay just then the appearance was off the starboard beam, there had gathered and was slowly mounting a long, heavy body of thunderous cloud scarce visible as yet save in its few bronze outlines.
‘It will mean a change I hope,’ said I to Crimp; ‘more than mere thunder and lightning, let us pray. Yet the drop in the glass is scarcely noticeable.’
‘Time something happened anyway,’ said he. ‘Dum me if it ain’t been too hot even for the sharks to show themselves. I allow the “’Liza Robbins” ain’t over sweet just now.’
‘No, I’d rather be you than your brother to-day, Crimp.’
‘Sorry to hear from the captain,’ said he, ‘that Sir Wilfrid’s got the notion in his head that he’s growed in the night till he’s too tall to stand upright.’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and I hope his craze may end at that.’
‘There’s but one cure for the likes of such tantrums,’ said he.
‘And pray what is that, Mr. Crimp?’
‘Fright. Git the hair of a chap that’s mad to stand on end, and see if his crazes don’t fly clean off out of it like cannon balls out of a broadside of guns.’
‘Ay, but fright, as you call it, might drive my poor cousin entirely mad, Mr. Crimp.’
‘No fear,’ he answered. ‘Tell ’ee what I’ll ondertake to do. What’s the hour now?’
‘Call it six o’clock,’ said I.
‘Well, I’ll ondertake by half-past six to have Sir Wilfrid running about these ’ere decks.’
‘And what’s the prescription, pray?’
‘Why, there’s a scuttle to his cabin, ain’t there?’
‘Yes,’ I answered.
‘An’ it lies open, I allow, a day like this. Werry well. Give me ten minutes to go forrards and black my face and dress up my head according to the notion that’s in my mind; then let me be lowered by a bowline over the side. I pops my head into the scuttle and sings out in a terrible woice, “Hullo, there, I’m the devil,” I says, says I, “and I’ve come,” says I, “to see if ye’ve got any soul left that’s worth treating for.” And what d’ye think he’d do at sight of me? Why run out of his cabin as fast as his legs ’ud carry him.’
‘More likely let fly a pistol at you,’ I exclaimed, laughing at the look of self-complacency with which the sour little fellow eyed me. ‘However, Mr. Crimp, we’ll leave all remedies for Sir Wilfrid alone till we see what yonder shadow to the southward is going to do for us,’ and so saying I stepped below to change my coat for dinner.
Miss Laura arrived at the dinner table. She was pale with the heat. She toyed with a morsel of cold fowl and sipped seltzer and hock.
‘The dead calm,’ said I, ‘gives you a young lady’s appetite.’
‘I am here,’ she answered, ‘because I do not know where else to be.’
‘You are here,’ said I, ‘because you are good and kind, and know that I delight in your society.’
She fanned herself. As the mercury rises past a certain degree sentiment falls. Emotion lies north and south of the line, hardly on it unless in a black skin. How death-like was the repose upon the yacht! The sun had gone out in the western thickness with a flare like the snuff of a blown-out candle, and a sort of brown dimness as of smoke followed him instead of the staring red and living glare that accompanies his descent in clear weather in those parts. The cabin lamp was lighted; it hung without a phantom of vibration, and sitting at that table was like eating in one’s dining room ashore. I glanced my eye round the interior. Delicate and elegant was the appearance of the cabin. The mirrors multiplied the white oil flames of the silver burners; the carpet, the drapery, the upholstery of chairs and couches stole out in rich soft dyes upon the gaze. The table was radiant with white damask and[275] glass and plate and plants. Confronting me was the charming figure of the sweet girl with whom I had been intimately associated for several weeks. Her golden hair sparkled in the lamplight; from time to time she would lift her violet eye with a drowsy gleam in it to mine.
‘Heat depresses the spirits,’ said I. ‘I feel dull. What is going to happen, I wonder?’
‘Is the wind ever likely to blow again?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I shall have the pleasure of conducting you on deck presently, when I will show you a fine bank of clouds in the south that will be revealed to us by lightning, if I truly gather the character of the vapour from the bronzed lines of it which I witnessed a little while ago.’
‘Have you seen Wilfrid since lunch?’
‘Yes; he talks very sensibly. He beckoned me to his bunk side to whisper that Cutbill made him laugh. Anything to divert the dear fellow’s mind. I presume you have seen nothing of Lady Monson?’
‘Nothing,’ she answered, fanning her pale face till the yellow hair upon her brow danced as though some invisible hand was showering gold dust upon her.
‘Jacob Crimp,’ said I softly, ‘is of opinion that he could drive Wilfrid on deck by blacking his face, looking in upon him through his open porthole, and calling himself the devil.’
‘He need not black his face,’ said she, with the first smile that I had seen upon her lip that day, ‘but if he does anything of the sort I hope he will be treated as Muffin was.’
‘Yet I am of opinion,’ said I, ‘that a great fright would impel Wilfrid to make for the door. He would pass through it of course, and then his hallucination would fall from him.’
She shook her head. ‘You must not allow him to be frightened, Mr. Monson.’
‘Depend upon it I shan’t,’ I replied. ‘I merely repeat a sour seaman’s rude and homely prescription.’
As I spoke the yacht slightly rolled, and simultaneously with the movement, as it seemed, one felt the dead atmosphere of the cabin set in motion.
‘Good!’ I cried, ‘’tis the first of the change. Now heave to it, my beauty!’
Again the yacht softly dipped her side. I jumped up to look at the tell-tale compass, and as I did so the skylight glanced to a pale glare as of sheet lightning. I waited a minute to mark the rolling of the craft that was now dipping sluggishly but steadfastly with rhythmic regularity on undulations which were still exceedingly weak, and found the set of the suddenly risen swell to be north as near as I could judge.
‘Well, Miss Laura,’ said I, ‘I think now we may calculate upon a breeze of wind, presently, from a right quarter too.’
I looked at the hour; it was twenty minutes to eight. The[276] death-like hush was broken; the preternatural repose of the last day and night gone. Once more you heard the old familiar straining sounds, the click of hooked doors, the feeble grinding of bulkheads, with the muffled gurgling of water outside mingled with the frequent flap of canvas; but I could be sure that there was no breath of air as yet; not the least noise of rippling flowed to the ear, and the yacht still lay broadside on to her course.
‘Let us go on deck,’ said I.
She sent her maid, who was passing at the moment, for her hat, and we left the cabin.
‘Hillo!’ I cried as I emerged from the companion, holding her hand that lay almost as cold in mine as if it were formed of the snow which it resembled, ‘there’s another of your friends up there, Miss Laura,’ and I pointed to the topgallant yardarm, upon which was floating a corposant, ghastly of hue but beautiful in brilliance.
She looked up and spoke as though she shuddered. ‘Those things frighten me. What can be more ghostly than a light that is kindled as that is? Oh, Mr. Monson, what a wild flash of lightning!’
A wild flash it was, though as far off as the horizon. Indeed it was more than one stroke: a copper-coloured blaze that seemed to fill the heavens behind the clouds with fire, against which incandescent background the sky-line of the long roll of vapour stood out in vast billows black as pitch, whilst from the heart of the mass there fell a light like a fireball, to which the sea there leapt out yellow as molten gold.
I strained my ear. ‘No thunder as yet,’ said I. ‘I hope it is not going to prove a mere electric storm, flames and detonations and an up and down cataract of rain breathless in its passage with a deader calm yet to follow.’
All at once the light at the topgallant yardarm vanished, a soft air blew, and there arose from alongside a delicate, small, fairy-like noise of the lipping and sipping of ripples.
‘Oh, how heavenly is this wind!’ exclaimed Miss Laura, reviving on a sudden like a gas-dried flower in a shower of rain; ‘it brings my spirits back to me.’
‘Trim sail the watch!’ bawled Crimp. But there was little to trim; all day long the yacht had lain partially stripped. No good, Finn had said, in exposing canvas to mere deadness. She wheeled slowly to the control of her helm, bowing tenderly upon the swell that was now running steadily with an almost imperceptible gathering of weight in its folds, and presently she was crawling along with her head pointing north before the weak fanning, with the lightning astern of her making her canvas come and go upon the darkness as though lanterns green and rose-bright were being flashed from the deck upon the cloths. The sea was pale with fire round about us. Indeed the air was so charged with electricity that I felt the tingling of it in the skin of my head as though it were in[277] contact with some galvanic appliance, and I recollect pulling off my cap whilst I asked Miss Laura if she could see any sparks darting out of my hair. The skylight, gratings, whatever one could sit upon, streamed with dew. I called to the steward for a couple of camp-stools and placed them so as to obtain the full benefit of the draught feebly breezing down out of the swinging space of the mainsail. The air was hot, and under the high sun it would doubtless have blown with a parching bite that must have rendered it even less endurable than the motionless atmosphere of the calm; but the dew moistened it now; it was a damp night air, with a smell of rain behind it besides, and the gushing of it upon the face was inexpressibly delicious and refreshing.
‘We are but little better than insects,’ said Miss Laura; ‘entirely the children of the weather.’
‘Rather compare us to birds,’ said I; ‘I don’t like insects.’
‘You complained of feeling depressed just now, Mr. Monson. Are you better?’
‘I am the better for this air, certainly,’ said I, ‘but I don’t feel particularly cheerful. I shouldn’t care to go to a pantomime, for instance, nor should I much enjoy a dance. What is it? The influence of that heap of electricity out yonder, I suppose,’ I added, looking at the dense black massed-up line of cloud astern, over all parts of which there was an incessant play of lightning, with copperish glances behind that gave a lining of fire to the edges of the higher reaches of the vast coast of vapour. It was like watching some gigantic hangings of tapestry wrought in flame. The imagination rather than the eye witnessed a hundred fantastic representations—heads of horses, helmets, profiles of titanic human faces, banners and feathers, and I know not what besides. It was very dark overhead and past the bows; the thickness that had been upon the sky all day was still there; not the leanest phantom of star showed, and the stoop of the heavens seemed the nearer and the blacker for the flashings over our taffrail, and for the pale phosphoric sheets which went wavering on all sides towards the murkiness of the horizon.
I spied Finn conversing with Crimp at the gangway; the lightning astern was as moonlight sometimes, and I could see both men looking aloft and at the weather in the south and consulting. In a few minutes they came our way.
‘What is it to be, Finn?’ said I.
‘Well, sir,’ he answered, ‘this here swell that’s slowly a-gathering means wind. It will be but little more, though, than an electric squall, I think—a deal of fire and hissing and a burst of breeze, and then quietness again with the black smother spitting itself out ahead. The barometer don’t seem to give more caution than that anyway, sir. But there’s never no trusting what ye can’t see through.’
He turned to Crimp. ‘Better take the mainsail off her, Jacob,’[278] said he, ‘and let her slide along under her foresail till we see what all that there yonder sinnifies.’
The order was given; the sailors tumbled aft; the great stretch of glimmering, ashen cloths, burning and blackening alternately as they reflected the tempestuous flares withered upon the dusk as the peak and throat halliards were settled away; the sail was furled, the huge mainboom secured, and the watch went forward softly as cats upon their naked feet.
Ha! what is that? Right ahead, on a line with our bowsprit, there leapt from the black breast of the sea, on the very edge of the ocean, if not past it, a body of flame, brilliant as sunshine but of the hue of pale blood. It came and went, but whilst it lived it made a ghastly and terrifying daylight of the heavens and the water in the north, revealing the line of the horizon as though the sun’s upper limb were on a level with it till the circle of the sea could have been followed to either quarter.
‘That was not lightning,’ cried Miss Laura in a voice of alarm.
‘Finn,’ I shouted, ‘did you see that?’
‘Ay, sir,’ he cried with an accent of astonishment from the opposite side of the deck.
‘What in the name of thunder was it, think you?’ I inquired.
‘Looked to me like a cloud of fire dropped clean out of the sky, sir,’ he answered.
‘No, no,’ exclaimed the hoarse voice of the fellow who grasped the helm, ‘my eye was on it, capt’n. It rose up.’
‘Listen,’ cried I, ‘if any report follows it.’
But we could hear no sound save the distant muttering of thunder astern.
‘It looked as though a ship had blown up,’ said Miss Laura.
‘I say, captain,’ I called, ‘d’ye think it likely that a vessel has exploded down there?’
‘There’s been nothen in sight, sir,’ he answered.
‘And why? Because the atmosphere has been blind all day,’ I replied. ‘You’d see the light of an explosion when the craft herself would be hidden.’
‘’Twarn’t no ship, sir,’ muttered the fellow at the wheel, considering himself licensed by the excitement of the moment to deliver his opinion. ‘I once see the like of such a flare as that off the Maldives.’
‘What was it?’ inquired Miss Laura.
‘A sea-quake, miss.’
‘Ha!’ I exclaimed, ‘that’ll be it, Finn.’
We fell silent, all of us gazing intently ahead, never knowing but that another wild light would show that way at any moment. Though I was willing enough to believe it to have been a volcanic upheaval of flame, I had still a fancy that it might be an explosion on board a ship too, some big craft that had been out of sight all day in the thickness; and I kept my eyes fixed upon the horizon in that quarter with a half-formed fancy in me of witnessing some[279]thing there by the light of some stronger flash than the rest out of the stalking and lifting blackness astern of us.
‘I cannot help thinking,’ said Miss Laura, rising as she spoke, and arching her fingers above her eyes to peer through the hollow of her hands, ‘that I sometimes see a pale, steam-like column resembling ascending smoke that spreads out on top in the form of a palm-tree. Now I see it!’ she cried, as a brilliant flash behind us sent its ghastly yellow into the far confines ahead, till the whole ocean lifted dark and flat to it.
The thunder began to rattle ominously, the light breeze faltered, and the foresail swung sulkily to the bowing of the vessel upon the swell that was distinctly increasing in weight. We all looked, but none of us could distinguish anything resembling the appearance the girl indicated.
‘If the flame rose from the sea,’ said I, ‘it is tolerably certain to have sent up a great body of steam. That is, no doubt, what you see, Miss Jennings.’
‘It lingers,’ she exclaimed, continuing to stare.
‘The draught’s a-taking off,’ rumbled Finn. ‘Stand by for a neat little shower.’
As the air died away it grew stiflingly hot again, hotter, it seemed, than it was before the breeze blew. The huge volumes of dense shadows astern were literally raining lightning; the swell ran in molten glass, and the still comparatively subdued roar of the thunder came rolling along those sweeping, polished brows as though the ocean were an echoing floor and there were a body of giants away down where the lightning was sending colossal bowls at us.
All at once, and in a manner to drive the breath out of one’s body with the suddenness and astonishment of it, the yacht’s bows rose to a huge roller that came rushing at her from right ahead. Up she soared till I dare say she showed twenty foot of her keel forward out of water. The vast liquid mass swept past the sides with a roar that drowned the cannonading of the heavens. Down flashed the vessel’s bows whilst her stern stood up as though she were making her last plunge. I grasped Laura by the waist, clipping hold of a backstay just in time to save us both from being dashed on the deck. Finn staggered and was thrown. Out of the obscurity in the fore part of the schooner rose a wild, hoarse cry of dismay and confusion mingled with the din of crockery tumbling and breaking below, and the grinding sound of movable objects sliding from their places. Heaven and earth, what is it? Another! Not so mountainous this time, but a terribly heavy roller nevertheless. Up rose the yacht again to it, then down fell her stem with a boiling of white waters about her bow, amid the seething of which and the thunder of the liquid volume rushing from off our counter you heard a second cry, or rather groan of amazement and alarm, from the sailors forward, with more distracting noises below.
I continued to grip Laura and to hold firmly to the backstay with my wits almost scattered by the incredible violence of the yacht’s soaring and plunging, and by the utter unexpectedness of the swift, brief, headlong dance. But now the yacht floated on a level keel again and continued so to float, the calm being as dead as ever it had been in the most stagnant hour of the day, saving always the southerly undulation which the two gigantic rollers had temporarily flattened out, though the heaving presently began again. I saw Finn rubbing his nose like a dazed man as he stood staring towards the lightning.
‘What could it have been?’ cried Laura.
‘Two volcanic seas, mum,’ answered the fellow who grasped the wheel; ‘there’s most times three. Capt’n, beg pardon, sir, but that’ll ha’ been a mighty bust up yonder to have raised a weight of rollers to be felt as them two was all this distance away.’
‘The most surprising thing that ever happened to me, Mr. Monson,’ cried Finn, still bewildered.
A great drop of rain—a drop do I call it? it seemed as big as a hen’s egg—splashed upon my face, and at the same moment a flash of lightning swept an effulgence as of noontide into heaven and ocean, followed rapidly by an ear-splitting burst of thunder.
‘Finn’s little shower is beginning,’ said I, grasping Laura’s hand; ‘let us take shelter. Anyway the wet should cool the atmosphere if no wind follows. Bless me! how disgusting if it’s to prove merely a thunderstorm.’
I conducted her to the cabin. At the foot of the companion steps stood Lady Monson. She was without a hat, her face was of a deadly white, her large black eyes glowed with terror, her hair was roughly adjusted on her head, and long raven-hued tresses of it lay upon her shoulder and hung down her back. I could well believe that the old lord whom Laura had met at my cousin’s found something in this woman’s tragic airs and stately person to remind him of Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth.
‘What has happened?’ she exclaimed, addressing me without noticing her sister. I explained. ‘Are we in danger?’ she exclaimed, with an imperious sweep of her fiery eyes over my figure as though she could not constrain herself to the condescension of looking me full in the face.
‘I believe not,’ said I coldly, making as though to pass on, for I abhorred her manner and was shocked by her treatment of her sister.
She stood a moment looking up; but there came just then a fierce flash of lightning; she covered her eyes; at the same moment somebody on deck closed the companion. She then, without regarding us, went to her cabin.
Hardly had we seated ourselves when down plumped the rain. It seemed to roll over the edge of the cloud like the falls of Niagara, in a vast unbroken sheet of water. There was as much hail as rain; the stones of the bigness you find only in the tropics, where there[281] is plenty of lightning to manufacture them, and the sound of the downrush as it struck the deck and set the sea boiling was so deafening that, though the thunder was roaring almost overhead, nothing was to be heard of it. The lightning was horribly brilliant, and the cabin seemed filled with the sulphur-smelling blazes, though there was only a comparatively small skylight for them to show through. In a few minutes the rush of rain slackened, the volleying claps and rolling peals of thunder were to be heard again, with a noise, in the intervals, of the gushing of water overboard from our filled decks.
‘I hope the lightning will not strike the yacht,’ exclaimed Laura.
‘There is no safer place in a thunderstorm than a vessel in the middle of the wide ocean,’ I answered.
At that moment the burly form of Cutbill came out of Wilfrid’s cabin. His head dodged to right and left awhile in the corridor whilst he sought to make out who we were; then distinguishing us he approached.
‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘but his honour’s growed very crazy, and wants to know what was the cause of the yacht pitching so heavily just now.’
‘I will go to his berth and explain,’ said I.
‘Oh, Mr. Monson, please don’t leave me,’ cried Laura. ‘The lightning terrifies me.’
‘Then Cutbill,’ said I, ‘give my love to Sir Wilfrid and tell him that the pitching of the yacht was to a couple of seas caused, as we suppose, by a submarine earthquake away down in the north, probably fifteen miles distant.’
‘Thought as much, sir,’ said Cutbill, from whose face the perspiration was streaming, whilst his immense whiskers sparkled like a dew-laden bramble-bush in sunrise.
‘Also explain that I do not desire to leave Miss Jennings until this deafening and blinding business is over. I shall hope to carry my pipe to his berth by-and-by. But it must be very hot for you, Cutbill, in that cabin?’
‘Melting, sir. I feel to be a-draining away. Reckon there’ll be nothen left of me but my clothes if this here lasts.’
‘How is Sir Wilfrid?’
‘Well, sir, to be honest, I don’t at all like what I see in him. There’s come a sing’ler alteration in him. Can’t xactly describe it, sir; sort of stillness, and a queer whiteness of face, and a constant watching of me; his eyes are never off me, indeed. The heat’ll have a deal to do with it, I dessay.’
‘Some change may be at hand,’ said I, ‘from which he may emerge with his miserable hallucinations gone. Yet the heat should account for a deal too. Give him my message, Cutbill.’
The man knuckled his forehead and withdrew. The heat was so great owing to the companion hatch and skylight being closed, that my sweet companion seemed half-dead with it, and leaned[282] against me with her eyes closed, almost in a swoon. But the worst of the storm was over apparently, for the rain had ceased, and though the lightning was still intensely vivid, one knew by the sound of the thunder that what was fiercest had forged ahead of us and was settling away into the north. I called to the steward to open the companion doors and report the state of the weather. The moment the hatch lay clear to the night I felt a gush of refreshing and rain-sweetened air. Laura sat upright and gave a deep sigh.
‘Does it rain, steward?’ I sung out.
‘No, sir.’
‘Tell Captain Finn,’ said I, ‘to get some space of deck swabbed dry for Miss Jennings. The heat here is too much for the young lady.’
In a few moments I heard the slapping of several swabs and Finn’s long face glimmered through the open skylight. ‘The weather’s a-clearing, sir,’ he called down. ‘There’s a nice little air a-blowing. The lady’ll find the port side of the quarter-deck comfortable now.’
I conducted the girl up the ladder, but she kept her hand in my arm. Her manner had something of clinging in it, not wholly due to fear either. It was, in fact, as though she was influenced by an overpowering sense of loneliness, easy to understand when one thought of Wilfrid lying mad in his cabin and her sister shunning her with hate and rage.
What Finn meant by saying the weather was clearing I could not quite understand. It was pitch black to windward, that is to say, right over the stern, whence there was a small breeze blowing in faint, fitful, weak gusts as though irresolute. The thunderstorm was ahead and its rage seemed spent, for the lightning was no longer plentiful or brilliant and the thunder had faded into a sullen muttering. A lantern or two had been brought up from below by whose feeble lustre you witnessed the shadowy forms of seamen swabbing the decks or squeezing the water with scrubbing-brushes into the scuppers. The dark swell ran regularly and with power from the south, but there was nothing to be seen of it saving here and there the glittering of green sea fire upon some running brow to let you guess how tall it was. I went aft with Laura and looked over; the wake was a mere dim, glistening, crawling, dying out after a few fathoms. Indeed, the yacht had but the foresail on her with a headsail or two, and she seemed to owe what small way she was making more to the heave of the swell than to the light breeze. The darkness was a wonderful jumble of shadows. I never remember the like of such confusion of inky dyes. The obscurity resembled an atmosphere of smoke denser in one place than another, a little thin yonder, then just over the mastheads a stooping belly of soot, elsewhere a sort of faintness merging into impenetrable darkness.
‘Lay aft and loose the mains’l,’ rattled out Finn. ‘Double reef and then set it.’
The breeze now began to freshen; the watch came running on to the quarter-deck, and presently the wan space of double-reefed canvas slowly mounted.
‘I wish it would brighten a bit astern,’ said I; ‘no wolf’s throat could be blacker. There’ll be more than a capful of wind there, but it will blow the right way for us, so let it come.’
‘I feel,’ said Laura, ‘as though I had recovered perfect health after a dreadful illness.’
‘Now she walks,’ cried Finn, approaching where we stood to peer over the side; ‘blow, my sweet breeze. By the nose on my face, Mr. Monson, I smell a strong wind a-coming.’
It did not need the faculty of smell to hit the truth. The breeze was freshening as if by magic. A little sea was already running and the yeasty flashing of breaking heads spread far into the gloom. A loud noise of torn and simmering waters came from the bows and a white race of foam was speeding arrowlike from under the counter.
‘There is my sister,’ whispered Laura.
I instantly spied the tall figure of Lady Monson standing on the top step of the companion ladder taking in the deep refreshment of the wind. She stepped on to the deck, approached, saw us, and crossed to the other side. She called to Captain Finn.
‘Yes, my lady.’
‘A chair, if you please. I will sit here.’
A seat was procured from the cabin and placed for her abreast of the wheel close against the bulwarks. This time Laura was not to be driven below by the presence of her sister. The heat in the cabin outweighed her sensitiveness, and then again there was the darkness of the night which sundered the sides of the deck as effectually as if each had been as far off as the horizon. Yet for all that, the sort of fear in which she held Lady Monson subdued her now through the mere sense of the woman being near, scarce visible as she was, just a shadow against the bulwarks. I had to bend my ear to catch her voice through the hissing of the wind aloft and the singing and the seething of the foam alongside, so low was her utterance. We sat together right aft against the grating on the port side. The helmsman stood near with his eyes on the illuminated compass bowl, the reflection of which touched him as with a lining of phosphor and exposed a kind of gilded outline of his figure against the blackness as he stood swinging upon the wheel with a twirl of it now and again to left or to right as the vessel’s course on the compass card floated to port or starboard of the lubber’s mark. Though it was Finn’s watch below he kept the deck with Crimp, rendered uneasy by the thunder-black look of the night, along with the freshening wind and the lift of seas leaping with a foul-weather snappishness off the ebony slopes of the swell that had grown somewhat heavy and hollow. I could just distinguish the dark forms of the two men pacing the deck abreast of the gangway. The main sheet was well eased off, the great[284] boom swung fairly over the quarter, and there was a note of howling in the pouring of the wind, as it swept with increasing power into the glimmering ashen hollow of the reefed canvas and rushed away out from under the foot of it. There was no more lightning; the sea with its glancings of foam went black as ink to the ink of the heavens. There was no star, no break of faintness on high. The yacht flashed through the mighty shadow, whitening a long narrow furrow behind her, and helped by every dusky fold that drove roaring to her counter.
On a sudden there arose a loud and fearful cry forward.
‘Breakers ahead!’
The hoarse voice rang aft sheer through the shrill volume of the wind strong as a trumpet-note with the astonishment and fear in it.
Finn went to the side to look over, whilst I heard him roar out to Crimp, ‘Breakers in his eye. The nearest land’s a thousand miles off.’
I jumped up and thrust my head over the rail and saw, sure enough, startlingly close ahead a throbbing white line that, let it be what else it might, bore an amazing resemblance to the boiling of surf at the base of a cliff. There was nothing else to be seen; the pallid streak stretched some distance to right and left. ‘It’ll be a tide rip, sir!’ shouted Finn to me, and his figure melted into the obscurity as he went forward to view the appearance from the forecastle.
I continued peering. ‘No, it is breakers by heaven!’ I cried, with a wild leap of my heart into my very throat to the dull thunderous warring note I had caught during an instant’s lull in the sweep of the wind past my ear.
Laura came to my side; we strained our eyes together.
‘Breakers, my God!’ I cried again, ‘we shall be into them in a minute.’
Then out of the blackness of the forecastle there came from Finn, though ’twas hard to recognise his voice, a fierce, half-shrieking cry: ‘Hard a starboard! Hard a starboard!’
I rushed to the wheel to assist the man in putting it hard over. At that instant the yacht struck! In a breath the scene became a hellish commotion of white waters leaping and bursting fiercely alongside, of yells and cries from the men, of screams from Lady Monson, of the grinding and splintering of wood, the cracking of spars, the furious beating of canvas. I felt the hull lifted under my feet with a brief sensation of hurling, then crash! she struck again. The shock threw me on my back; though I was half-stunned I can distinctly recollect hearing the ear-splitting, soul-subduing noise of the fall of the mainmast, that broke midway its height and fell with all its gear and weight of canvas like a thunderbolt from the heavens on the port side of the vessel, shattering whole fathoms of bulwark. I sprang to my feet; Laura had me by the arm when I fell and she still clung to me. There was a life-buoy close beside[285] us; it hung by a laniard to a peg. I whipped it off and got it over Laura’s head and under her arms, and the next thing I remember is dragging her towards the forecastle, where I conceived our best chance would lie.
What had we struck? There was no land hereabouts. If we had not run foul of the hulk of some huge derelict buried from the sight in the blackness and revealing nothing but the foam of the seas beating against it, then we must have been caught by a second volcanic upheaval into whose fury we had rushed whilst the devilish agitation was in full play. So I thought, and so I remember thinking; but that even a rational reflection could have entered my mind at such a time, that my brain should have retained the power of keeping its wits in the least degree collected, I cannot but regard as a miracle, when I look back out of this calm mood into the distraction and horror and death of that hideous night. The seas were breaking in thunder shocks over the vessel; the wind was hoary with flying clouds of froth. In a few instants the ‘Bride’ had become a complete wreck aloft. Upon whatever it was that she had struck she was rapidly pounding herself into staves, and the horrible work was being expedited outside her by the blows of the wreckage of spars which the seas poised and hurled at her with the weight and rage of battering-rams. The decks were yawning and splitting under foot; every white curl of sea flung inboard black fragments of the hull. There is nothing in language to express the uproar, the cries and groans and screams of men maimed and mutilated by the fall of the spars or drowning alongside. I thought of Wilfrid; but the life of the girl who was clinging to me was dearer to my heart than his or my own. I could hear Lady Monson screaming somewhere forward as I dragged Laura towards the forecastle. Sailors rushed against me, and I was twice felled in measuring twenty paces. The agony of the time gave me the strength of half-a-dozen men; the girl was paralysed, and I snatched her up in my arms and drove forward staggering and reeling, blinded with the flying wet, half-drowned by the incessant play of seas over the side, feeling the fabric crumbling under my feet as you feel sand yielding under you as the tide crawls upon it. I knew not what I was about nor what I aimed at doing. I believe I was influenced by the notion that, since the yacht had struck bow on, her forecastle would form the safest part of her, as lying closest to whatever it was that she had run foul of. I recollect that as I approached the fore rigging, stumbling blindly with the girl in my arms, a huge black sea swept over the forward part of the wreck and swept the galley away with it as though it had been a house of cards. The rush of water floated me off my legs; I fell and let go of Laura. Half-suffocated I was yet in the act of rising to grope afresh for her when another sea rolled over the rail and I felt myself sweeping overboard with the velocity that a man falling from the edge of a cliff might be sensible of!
What followed is too dream-like for me to determine. Some[286] small piece of floating spar I know I caught hold of, and that is what I best and perhaps only remember of that passage of mortal anguish.
I lost my senses after I had been in the water a few minutes: whether through being nearly strangled by the foam which broke incessantly over me, or through being struck by some fragment of the wreck I cannot say. Yet I must have retained my grip of the piece of spar I had grabbed hold of on being swept overboard with the proverbial tenacity of the drowning, for I found myself grasping it when I recovered consciousness. I lay on my back with my face to the sky, and my first notion was that I had dropped to sleep on the yacht’s deck, and that I had been awakened by rain falling in torrents. But my senses were not long in coming to me, and I then discovered that what I believed to be rain was salt spray flying in clouds upon and over me from a thunderous surf that was roaring and raging within a few strides. It was very dark, there was nothing to be seen but the white boiling of the near waters with the intermittent glancing of the heads of melting seas beyond. I felt with my hands and made out that I was lying on something as hard as rock, honeycombed like a sponge. This I detected by passing my hand over the surface as far as I could reach without rising. After a little I caught sight of a black shadow to the right thrown into relief by the broad yeasty throbbing amid which it stood. It was apparently motionless, and I guessed it to be a portion of the ‘Bride.’ The wind howled strongly, and the noise of the breaking seas was distracting. Yet the moment I had my mind, as I may say, fully, I was sensible of a heat in the air very nearly as oppressive as had been the atmosphere in the cabin of the yacht that evening; and this in spite of the wind which blew a stiff breeze and which was full of wet besides. Then it was that there entered my mind the idea that the yacht had struck and gone to pieces upon a volcanic island newly hove up in that sudden great flame which had leapt upon our sight over the ‘Bride’s’ bows some two or three hours before at a distance, as we had computed, of fifteen miles, and which had seemed to set the whole of the northern heavens on fire.
I felt round about me with my hands again; the soil was unquestionably lava, and the heat in it was a final convincing proof that my conjecture was right. I rose with difficulty, and standing erect looked about, but I could distinguish nothing more than a mere surface of blackness blending with and vanishing in the yelling and hissing night flying overhead. I fell upon my knees to grope in that posture some little distance from the surf to[287] diminish by my withdrawal something of the pelting of the pitiless storm of spray; and well it was that I had sense enough to crawl in this manner, for I had not moved a yard when my hand plunged into a hole to the length of my arm. The cavity was full of water, deep enough to have drowned me for all I knew, whilst the orifice was big enough to receive three or four bodies of the size of mine lashed together. There was no promise of any sort of shelter. The island, as well as I could determine its configuration by the surf which circled it, went rounding out of the sea in a small slope after the pattern of a turtle-shell. However, I succeeded in creeping to a distance where the spray struck me without its former sting, and then I stood up and putting my hands to the sides of my mouth shouted as loud as my weak condition would suffer me.
A voice deep and hoarse came back like an echo of my own from a distance, as my ear might conjecture, of some twenty paces or so.
‘Hallo! Who calls?’
‘I, Mr. Monson. Who are you.’
‘Cutbill,’ he roared back.
I brought my hands together, grateful to God to hear him, for how was I to know till then but that I might be the only survivor of the yacht’s company?
‘Can you come to me, Cutbill?’ I cried.
‘I don’t like to let go of the lady, sir,’ he answered.
‘Which lady?’ I shouted.
‘Miss Jennings.’
‘Is she alive, Cutbill?’
‘Ay, sir.’
By this time my sight was growing used to the profound blackness. The clouds of pallid foam along the margin of the island flung a sort of shadow of ghastly illumination into the atmosphere, and I fancied I could see the blotch the figure of Cutbill made to the right of me on the level on which I stood. I forthwith dropped on my knees again and cautiously advanced, then more plainly distinguished him, and in a few minutes was at his side. It was the shadowy group, the outlines barely determinable by my sight, even when I was close to, of the big figure of the sailor seated with the girl supported on his arm. I put my lips close to the faint glimmer of her face, and cried ‘Laura, dearest, how is it with you? Would God it had been my hand that had had the saving of you!’
She answered faintly, ‘Take me; let me rest on you?’
I put my arm round her and brought her head to my breast and so held her to me. Soaked as we were to the skin like drowned rats, the heat floating up out of the body of volcanic stuff on which we lay prevented us from feeling the least chill from the pouring of the wind through our streaming clothes.
‘Oh, my God, Laura!’ I cried, ‘I feared you were gone for ever when I lost my hold of you.’
‘The life-buoy you put on saved me,’ she exclaimed, so faintly, that I should not have heard her had not my ear been close to her lips.
‘The lady had a life-buoy on, sir,’ said the deep voice of Cutbill, ‘she was stranded alongside of me, and I dragged her clear of the surf and have been holding of her since, for this here soil is a cuss’d hard pillow for the heads of the likes of her.’
‘Are you hurt, Cutbill?’
‘No, sir, not a scratch that I’m aware of. I fell overboard and a swell run me ashore as easy as jumping. But I fear most of ’em are drownded.’
‘Lady Monson!’ I cried.
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘And my cousin?’
‘Mr. Monson!’ he exclaimed in a broken voice, ‘the instant I felt what had happened I laid hold of Sir Wilfrid to drag him on deck! He yelled out and clung, and ’twould have been like mangling the gentleman, sir, to have used my whole strength upon him if so be as my arms had been equal to the job of even making him budge. I gave up; I wanted to save my life, sir; I could hear the vessel going to pieces and reckoned upon his following me if I ran out. I fear he’s drownded, sir.’
‘Ah, great heaven! Poor Wilf! Merciful Father, that this desperate voyage should end thus!’
I felt the girl shuddering and trembling on my breast.
‘Darling,’ I cried, ‘take heart! Daylight has yet to tell us the whole story. How sudden! How shocking! Cutbill, you have lungs; for God’s sake, hail the darkness, that we may know if others are living!’
He did so; a faint halloo, sounding some distance from the right, replied. He shouted again and an answer was again returned, this time in another voice; it was feebler, but it proved at all events that there were others besides ourselves who had survived the destruction of the yacht. What the hour was I did not know. The night wore away with intolerable and killing slowness, the wind decreased, the sea moderated, the boiling of the surf that had been fierce for a long while took a subdued note, and the wind blew over us free of spray. Till daybreak I was cradling Laura on my arm. Frequently she would sit up to lighten the burthen of her form, but as often as she did so, again would she bring her head to my breast. What the dawn was to reveal I could not imagine, yet I felt so much happiness in the thought of Laura’s life being spared and in having her at my side, that I waited the disclosures of daybreak without dread.
At last there came a sifting of grey light into the east. By this time there was no more than a gentle wind blowing; but the sky had continued of an impenetrable blackness all night, and when day broke I witnessed the reason of the oppressive obscurity[289] in a surface of leaden cloud that lay stretched all over the face of the heavens without the least break visible in it anywhere.
It was natural that the moment light enough stole into the atmosphere to see by, my first look should be at the girl by my side. Her head was uncovered; I in slipping on the lifebuoy, or Cutbill in removing it from her, had bared her hair, and the beautiful gold of it lay like a cloud upon her back and shoulders. It was as dry as were our clothes; the heat of the island had indeed served us as an oven. She was deadly pale, hollow-eyed, with a shadow as of the reflection of a spring leaf under each eye; her lips blanched, her countenance piteous with its expression of fear. Her dress had been torn by the wreckage: more shipwrecked than she no girlish figure could ever have looked, yet her beauty stole through all like a spirit breathing in her, and I could not release her without first pressing her to my heart and kissing her hand and fondling it, whilst I thanked God that she was alive and that we were together.
The yacht had broken in half from a few feet abaft of where her foremast had stood. All the after part of her had disappeared; nothing remained but the bows with the black planks winding round, jagged, twisted, broken; an incredible ruin! The putty-coloured shore that looked to the eye to trend with something of the smoothness of pumice-stone to the wash of the surf was dark with wreckage. I saw several figures lying prone amongst this litter of ribs and planks and cases and the like; there were others again recumbent higher up—five of them I counted—a few hundred paces distant, two of whom, as the three of us sat casting our eyes about us, slowly rose to their legs to survey the scene. One of these was Finn, the other one of the crew of the ‘Bride.’
I exclaimed, pointing to the furthest of the three figures who continued recumbent, ‘Isn’t that a woman?’
Cutbill stared; Laura, whose eyes were keen, said, ‘Yes. Is it Henrietta or my maid?’
Finn perceived us and held up his hand, and made as if to come to us; but on a sudden he pressed his side, halted, and then slowly seated himself. I gazed eagerly around me for signs of further life. It was now clear daylight, with a thinning of the leaden sky in the east that promised a sight of the sun presently with assurance of a clear sky a little later on. It was to be easily seen now that this island which had brought about the destruction of the ‘Bride’ was a volcanic upheaval created in the moment of the prodigious blaze of light we had viewed in the north. It was of the form of an oyster-shell, going with a rounded slope to amidships from one margin to another, and was everywhere of a very pale sulphur colour. It was within a mile in circumference, and therefore, but a very short walk in breadth, and at its highest point rose to between twelve and fifteen feet above the sea. There stood, however, on the very apex of it, if I may so term the central point of its rounded back, a vast lump of rock, as I took it to be. But my eye ran over it incuriously. We were making towards[290] Finn and the others when I glanced at it, and my mind was so full that I gave the thing no heed.
It was necessary to walk with extreme caution. The island was like a sponge, as I have before said, punctured with holes big and little, some large as wells and apparently deep. But for these holes walking would have been easy, for everywhere between the surface was as smooth as if it had been polished. In many parts a sort of vapour-like steam crawled into the air. Now that the wind was gone you felt the heat of this amazing formation striking up into the atmosphere, and I confess my heart fell sick in me on considering how it should be when the sun shone forth in power and mingled the sting of its glory with the oven-like temperature of this fire-created island.
There were many dead fish about, some floating belly up in the wells, others dry, of all sizes and sorts, with the dark-blue, venomous form of a dead shark a full fifteen feet long close down by the edge of the sea, about forty paces to the left of the wreck.
Laura walked without difficulty. She leaned upon my arm, but there was no weight in her pressure. The lifebuoy had held her head well above water, and she had been swept ashore without suffering; the resting of her limbs, too, through the long hours of the night had helped her; there was comfort also in the dryness of her clothes, and I was very sensible likewise that my presence gave her heart and spirit.
‘It is Henrietta!’ she exclaimed.
Yes! the figure that at a distance might have passed for Lady Monson or Laura’s maid now proved the former. She had been resting some little distance apart from the others with her head upon her arm, but suddenly she sat upright and looked fixedly towards us. She, like Laura, was without covering to her head; her pomp of black hair fell with gipsy wildness to her waist; her posture was so still, her regard of us so stubbornly intent, that I feared to discover her mind was wanting.
‘I will go to her,’ said Laura.
Yet I witnessed the old recoil in her as though there was nothing in the most tragic of all conditions to bate her sister’s subduing influence. She withdrew her hand from my arm and pressed forward; as she approached, Lady Monson slowly rose, tottered towards her, threw her clasped hands upwards with her face upturned, and then fell upon Laura’s neck.
Finn called feebly to me, ‘God be praised you’re safe, Mr. Monson, and sound, I hope, sir? And how is it with ye, mate?’ addressing Cutbill.
I grasped his hand; the tears gushed into his eyes, and he pointed towards the wreck and to the bodies amongst the stuff that had been washed ashore, whilst he slowly shook his head. He looked grey, haggard, hollow, ill, most miserable, as though he had lived ten years since last night and was sick and near his end.
‘Cap’n,’ cried Cutbill in a broken voice, ‘’twas no man’s fault. Who’s to keep a look-out for islands after this pattern?’
I seated myself by Finn’s side. ‘Keep up your heart,’ said I. ‘You are not hurt, I trust?’
‘Something struck me here,’ said he, putting his hand to his left breast, ‘whilst I was swimming, and it makes me feel a bit short-winded. But it isn’t that what hurts me, Mr. Monson. It’s the thoughts of them who’ve gone, and the sight of what was yesterday, sir, the sweetest craft afloat. Who’d have thought she’d have crumbled up so fast? reg’larly broke her back and gone into staves aft! She was staunch, but only as a pleasure wessel is.’
I asked Cutbill to examine the people who were lying on what I must call the beach, and report if there was any life in them.
‘My cousin is drowned,’ I said to Finn.
‘Oh, blessed God!’ he answered. ‘Cutbill knows; he couldn’t get him out of his berth, I allow!’
‘Ay, that was it,’ I said, ‘but this is no time for grieving for the dead, Finn. Regrets are idle. How are we who are spared to save our lives? Are the yacht’s boats all gone?’
I ran my eye along the beach and over the sea, but nothing resembling a boat was visible. The sailor that had stood up with Finn when I had first caught sight of them had seated himself a little distance away, Lascar fashion, and I noticed him at that moment dip his forefinger into a hole close beside him, suck it and then drink by lifting water in the palm of his hand. I called to him, ‘Is it fresh?’
‘Pretty nigh, sir,’ he answered.
There was such another little hole near me half full of water, as indeed was every well or aperture of the kind that I saw. I dipped as the sailor had and found the water slightly, but only very slightly, brackish. This I concluded was owing to the overwhelming weight of rain that had followed the upheaval of this island overflowing the hollows and holes in it so abundantly as to drown the salt water, with which, of course, the cavities had been filled when this head of lava had been forced to the surface. I bade Finn dip his hand and taste, and told him that our first step must be to hit upon some means of storing a good supply before the heat should dry up the water.
There were two sailors lying close together a few yards from where the seaman had squatted himself, and I called to him to know if they were alive. He answered ‘Yes,’ and shouted to them, on which they turned their heads, and one of them languidly rose to his elbows, the other lay still.
‘It will be the wreckage that drownded most of them and that hurt them that’s come off with their lives,’ exclaimed Finn. ‘It was like being thrown into whirling machinery. How many shall we be able to muster? I fear they’re but bodies, sir,’ indicating the figures over which Cutbill was stooping.
All this while Laura and her sister were standing and con[292]versing. I was starting to walk to the wreckage that stood at the foreshore, when Laura slightly motioned to me to approach her. I at once went to her, watching every foot of ground I measured, for the island was just a surface of pitfalls, and one could not imagine how deep the larger among them might prove. Lady Monson bowed to me with as much dignity as if she were receiving me in a ball-room. Her face looked like a dead woman’s vitalised by some necromantic agency, so preternatural was the ghastly air produced by the contrast between the tomb-like tincture of the flesh and the raven blackness of her mass of flowing hair, and the feverish glow in her large dark eyes. I returned her salutation, and she extended a lifeless, ice-cold hand.
‘I am asking Laura what is to become of us,’ she exclaimed with a distinct hint of her imperious nature in her voice, and fastening her eyes upon me as from a habit of commanding with them.
‘I cannot tell,’ I answered; ‘our business is to do the best we can for ourselves.’
‘How many are living?’ she asked.
‘We do not as yet know, but I fear no more than you see alive. My cousin is drowned, I fear.’
Her eyes fell, she drew a deep breath and continued looking down; then her gaze, full of a sudden fire, flashed to my face again.
‘I am not accountable for his death, Mr. Monson. Why do you speak significantly of this dreadful thing? I did not desire his death. I would have saved his life had the power to do so been given to me. Oh God!’ she cried, ‘it is cruel to talk or to look so as to make me feel as if the responsibility of all this were mine!’
She clasped one hand over another upon her heart, drawing erect her fine figure into a posture full of indignant reproach and passionate deprecation. Indeed, had I never met her before and not known better, I should have taken her to be some fine tragedy actress who could not perform in the humblest article of an everyday commonplace part without dressing her behaviour with the airs of the stage.
‘Pardon me,’ I exclaimed, ‘you mistake. I meant nothing significant. I thought you would wish to know if your husband had been spared. This is no moment for discussing any other question in the world but how we are to deliver ourselves from this terrible situation.’
As I turned to leave them I thought she regarded me with entreaty, almost with wistfulness, if such eyes as hers could ever take that expression, but she remained silent; and giving my love a smile—for my love she was now, and I cannot express how my heart went to her as she stood pale, worn, heavy-eyed, but lacking nothing of her old tenderness and sweetness and fairness by the side of her sister, listening timidly to the haughty, commanding creature’s words—I walked to meet Cutbill, who was slowly returning from his inspection of the bodies.
‘They’re all dead, sir,’ he exclaimed.
‘Ah!’ I cried.
‘There’s poor old Mr. Crimp——’ his voice failed him. He added, a little later, ‘they look more to have been killed than drownded, sir.’
‘Sir Wilfrid?’
‘No, he isn’t amongst them.’
We stood together looking towards the bodies.
‘Cutbill,’ said I, ‘We must all turn to now and collect what we can from the wreck that may prove useful to us. There’s nothing to eat here saving dead fish which will be rotting presently.’
The sea stretched in lead under the lead of the sky saving in the far east, where the opening of the heavens there had shed a pearly film upon it bright with sunrise. The swell had flattened and was light, and rolled sluggishly to the island, sliding up and down the smooth incline soundlessly, save when now and again some head of it broke and boiled and rushed backwards white and simmering. I sent a long look round, but there was nothing in sight. One could follow the ocean girdle sheer round the island with but the break only of the queer rugged mass of rock in the centre where the slope came to its height. The line of shore which the remains of the yacht centred was a stretch of some hundred and fifty feet of porous rock like meerschaum in places, the declivity very gradual. It was covered with wreckage, and remains of the vessel continued to be washed ashore by the set and hurl of the swell.
I went to work with Cutbill to haul high and dry whatever we were able to deal with. We were presently joined by two of the sailors. Finn and the other man made an effort to approach, but I perceived they were too weak and would be of no use to us, and I called to them to continue resting themselves. Laura and Lady Monson were seated together and watched us. I could not gather that they conversed; at least, though I often directed a glance at them, I never observed that they looked at each other as people do who talk.
We toiled a long hour, and in that time had stacked at a good distance from the wash of the sea a store of articles of all kinds: casks of flour, salt beef, biscuit for forecastle use, a cask of sherry, some cases of potted meats, and other matters which I should only weary you by cataloguing. Had the shore been steep too we should probably have got nothing, but it shelved gently far past the point where the yacht had struck, and as the goods had floated out of the yacht they were rolled up like pebbles of shingle by the swell till they stranded; and, as I have said, even as we were busy in collecting what we wanted other articles came washing towards us. Every cask and barrel that was recoverable we saved for the sake of the drink it might contain. Amongst other things we succeeded in dragging high and dry the yacht’s foresail. This was a difficult[294] job, for first it had to be cut from the gear that held it to its wreck of spar, and then we had to haul it ashore, which was as much as the four of us could manage. We also saved the yacht’s chest of tools, a box of Miss Laura’s wearing apparel, and a small chest of drawers which had stood in my poor cousin’s cabin. Cutbill and another seaman who stood the firmest of the rest of us on their shanks had to wade breast-high before we could secure many of these goods which showed in the hollow of the swell but were too heavy to be trundled further up by the heave of the water, whose weight was fast diminishing. There was little risk, but it took time; plenty of rope had come ashore, and we secured lines to the men whilst they carried ends in their hands to make fast to the articles they went after. Then they waded back to us and the four of us hauled together, and in this way, as I have said, we saved an abundance of useful things.
There was plenty yet to come at, but we were forced to knock off through sheer fatigue. Our next step was to get some breakfast. I was very eager that poor Finn and the man that was lying near him should be rallied, and counted on a substantial meal and a good draught of wine going far towards setting them on their legs again.
‘Cutbill,’ said I, ‘whilst I overhaul the stores for breakfast, will you take Dowling,’ referring to the stronger of the two men who had joined us, ‘and bury those bodies there? They make a terrible sight for the ladies to see. I have not your strength of heart, Cutbill; the handling of the poor creatures would prove too much for me. Yet if you think it unreasonable that I should not assist——’
‘Oh, no, sir! it’s a thing that ought to be done. We shall have to carry ’em t’other side. They may slip into deep water there.’ He called to Dowling, and together they went to the bodies.
The carpenter’s chest was padlocked. Happily I had a bunch of keys in my pocket, one of which fitted. The chest was liberally furnished; we armed ourselves with chisel and hammers, a gimlet and the like, with which tools we had presently opened all that we needed to furnish us with a hearty repast. We stood casks on end for tables, and boxes and cases served as seats. There were sailors’ knives in the tool-chest, and we emptied and cleaned a jar of potted meat to use as a drinking vessel. The prostrate seaman, whose name was Johnson, was too weak to rise: so I sent Head to him, this fellow being one of the sailors who had worked with us on the beach, with a draught of sherry, some biscuits, and tinned meat, and had the satisfaction of seeing him fall to after he had tossed down the wine. Finn managed to join us, but he ate little and seemed broken down with grief.
There is much that I find hard to realise when I look back and reflect upon the incidents of this wild excursion of which I have done my best to tell you the story; but nothing seems so dream-like[295] as this our first meal upon that newly-created spot of sulphurous rock in the deepest solitude of the heart of the mighty Atlantic. The leaden curtain had gradually lifted off the face of the east, leaving a band of white-blue sky there ruled off by the vapour in a line as straight as the horizon. The sun floated clear in it; his slanting beam had flashed up the waters midway beneath into an azure of the delicate paleness of turquoise; but all the western side lay of a leaden hue yet under the shadow of the immense stretch of almost imperceptibly withdrawing vapour. At one cask sat Laura and Lady Monson. The weak draught of wind kept my sweetheart’s golden hair trembling; but Lady Monson’s hung motionless upon her back; it made one think of a thunder cloud when one looked at it and noticed the lightning of her glance as she sent her eyes in a tragic roll from the distant horizon to the fragment of rock and on to the island slope with the great strange bulk of rock nodding, as it seemed, on top; and the corpse-like whiteness of her face was a sort of stare in itself to remind you of the bald, stormy glare you sometimes see in the brow of a tempest lifting sombre and sulkily past the sea-line. Finn’s eyes clung with drooping lids to the fragment of the ‘Bride’; Head reclined near me in a sailor’s reckless posture, feeding heartily; down on the beach the figures of Cutbill and Dowling were passing out of sight with one or another of their dreadful burthens and then returning. None of us seemed able to look that way.
‘All yon wessel’s company saving the eight of us gone!’ exclaimed Finn. ‘And she’s what? Look at her. Just the shell of a yacht’s head. Oh, my God, Mr. Monson, how terrible sudden things do happen at sea!’
‘I never would ha’ believed that the “Bride” ’ud tumble to pieces like that though, capt’n,’ exclaimed Head.
‘Oh, man,’ cried Finn, ‘the swell lifted and dropped her. Didn’t ye feel it? Poor Sir Wilfrid! Mr. Monson, sir—I’d take his place if he could be here.’
‘I believe it, Finn. I am sure you would,’ I said with a swift glance at Lady Monson, whose head sank as she caught the poor fellow’s remark.
‘Has this island been thrown up from the very bottom of the sea?’ asked Laura.
‘From the very bottom of the sea,’ I answered, ‘and from a depth out of soundings too. It is the head of a mountain of lava created in a flash of fire, and taller, maybe, from base to peak than half-a-dozen Everests one on the top of another.’
‘Do not ships sail this way?’ said Lady Monson.
‘Plenty of them, my lady,’ answered Finn. ‘No fear of our being long here. A hisland in these waters where it is all supposed to be clear is bound to bring wessels close in to view it. The “’Liza Robbins” oughtn’t to be fur off.’ He shuddered and cried, ‘Poor Jacob Crimp! poor old Jacob! Gone! and the werry echo of the yarn he was spinning me last night ain’t yet off my[296] ears.’ He buried his long, rugged face in his hands, shaking his head.
‘Is there any means of escaping should a vessel not pass by?’ inquired Lady Monson.
‘We must pin our faith on being sighted and taken off,’ I answered.
‘But where are we to live meanwhile? What is there on this horrible spot to shelter us?’ she exclaimed with a sudden start, and darting a terrified look around her. ‘If stormy weather should come, the waves will sweep this island. How shall we be able to cling to it? All our provisions will be washed away. How then shall we live?’
‘It’ll take a middling sea to sweep this here rock, your ledship,’ said Johnson feebly. ‘But it is to be swept capt’n. What’s the height o’ un?’
‘Two fadom end on, I allow,’ said Head.
‘Silence!’ roared Finn, putting the whole of his slender stock of vitality as one should suppose into his shout. ‘What d’ye want? to scare all hands by jawing? My lady, there’s nothen to be afraid of. It blew strong last night arter the yacht had stranded; but this island wasn’t swept or we shouldn’t be here.’
I met my sweetheart’s frightened eyes, and to change the subject asked Lady Monson if she had reached the shore unaided.
‘No,’ she answered. ‘I owe my life to the sailor who is with that big seaman down there,’ meaning Dowling. ‘I am unable to explain. I was unconscious before I left the yacht.’
‘Her ladyship was washed overboard,’ said Finn. ‘Dowling, who was swimming, got one of his hands foul of your hair, my lady. He kept hold, towed your ladyship as the swell ran him forrads, felt ground, and hauled ye ashore. He behaved well.’
‘My poor maid is drowned!’ cried Laura.
‘Too many, miss, too many! Oh, my God, too many!’ muttered poor Finn.
Meanwhile my eye had been resting incuriously upon the singular lump of rock that stood apparently poised on the highest slope in the very centre of the island. On a sudden I started to a perception that for the instant I deemed purely fanciful. The block of stuff was distant from where we were eating our breakfast some two hundred and eighty to three hundred yards. The complexion of it whilst the sky was in shadow had so much of the meerschaum-like tint of the island that one easily took it to be a mass of lava identical with the rest of the volcanic creation; but the sun was now pouring his brilliant white fires upon it, and I noticed a deal of sparkling in it as though it were coated with salt or studded with flints of crystal, whilst the bed in which it lay and the slope round about were of a dead, unreflecting pale yellow. My fixed regard attracted the attention of the others.
One of the two seamen looked and called out, ‘That ain’t a part of the island, sir.’
‘What form does it take to your fancy?’ I asked, addressing my companions generally.
There was a pause and Laura said, ‘It looks like a ship, an unwieldy vessel coming at us. Do you notice two erections like broken masts?’
Finn peered under his hand.
‘It certainly looks uncommonly like as if it had been a ship in its day,’ he exclaimed, ‘but these ’ere convulsions, I am told, are made up o’ fantastics.’
Cutbill and his companion were now approaching; they were fiery hot, their faces crimson, and they moved with an air of distress. Yet Cutbill made shift to sing out as he approached, pointing as he spoke, ‘Mr. Monson, there’s a ship ashore up there, sir. You get the shape of her plain round the corner.’
‘Come, lads!’ I cried, ‘sit and fall to. There’s plenty to eat here and drink to give you life. You have got well through a bitter business. Finn, do you feel equal to inspecting that object?’
‘Ay, sir,’ he answered. ‘I’m drawing my breath better. But it’s the mind, Mr. Monson—it’s the mind.’
‘Then come, all of us who will,’ I cried. ‘Laura, here is my arm for you, and here is a pocket handkerchief too to tie round your head.’
Lady Monson looked at her sister and rose with her. Laura came to my side and we started.
The surface of the island was so honeycombed that one dared not look elsewhere than downwards whilst walking, and so it was not until we had drawn close to the huge rock-like lump that I was able to give my attention to it.
How am I to describe this astonishing body? It was most clearly the petrified fabric of a ship, a vessel of considerable tonnage, that had been hove from the dark ocean-bed on which it had been resting for God alone could tell how many scores of years by the prodigious eruption that had sent this head of rock on which we stood rushing upwards through the deep into the view of the Atlantic heaven. She had been apparently a galleon in her day, and to judge from such shape as I could distinguish in her, she was probably upwards of a century and a half old. She was not much above three times as long as she was broad, and the figure of her, therefore, was only to be got by viewing her broadside on. She was incrusted with shells of a hundred different kinds and colours, with much exquisite drapery of lace-like weed. This shelly covering was manifestly very thick and astonishingly plentiful, but[298] though it increased her bulk it did not greatly distort her shape. You saw the form of the craft plain in the astonishing growth and adhesion. There was the short line of poop and then a little longer line of quarter-deck, then a deep waist broken again by the rise of the forecastle. You could follow the curve of the stem and cutwater and plainly see the square of the counter rising castle-like to a height of hard upon thirty feet from the surface on which she lay. She suggested the structure of a ship built of shells. The remains of a couple of masts shot up from her decks, one far forward, the other almost amidships, each about twelve feet high, as richly clothed as the hull with shells of many hues. She lay with a slight list; that is to say, a little on one side, the inclination being to starboard, and so far as one could guess, she was disconnected from the bed on which she reposed—probably thundered clear of it by the shock of earthquake, though she looked as solid as a block of cliff. Sparkling lines of water spouted from her upper works, but from below that part of her main-deck which sailors would call the covering board, she showed herself as tight as if she had been newly caulked and launched.
The sunshine streamed purely and with great power upon her, and though she had scarce been distinguishable from the rest of the island save in the shape of her when the sky was dark with cloud, she now flashed out on that side of her that faced the sun into the most barbarically glorious, richly coloured, admirably novel object that ever mortal eye lighted upon in this wide world. Pearl-coloured shells blended with blue and green; there were ruby stars; growths of a crystalline clarity prismatic as cut glass; shells of the cloud-like softness of milk but of the hardness of marble; patches of incrustation of an amber tint, others of a vivid green delicately relieved by the scoring of the burnished edges of mussel-like shells. The falls of water fell like curves of rainbow over this magnificence and splendour of marine decoration; the tapestry of weed hung moist and of an exquisite vividness of green. The short height of masts glittered in the sunshine with many lovely colours of silver and rose and other hues which made a very prism of each shaft of spar.
The whole of us stood gazing, lost in wonder; then Finn cried, ‘This is a wonderful sight, Mr. Monson.’
‘An old galleon full o’ treasure. Who’s to know?’ exclaimed the seaman Head.
‘From what depth will she have been thrown up?’ asked Laura.
‘From a soil too deep for human soundings,’ said I. ‘Wonderful that the blaze of fire in the heart of which she must have soared to this surface did not wither her up. But she seems perfect, not an ornament injured, not a jewel on her broken, no hint of having been scorched that I can anywhere see. She will have belonged to the last century, Finn?’
‘Ay, sir,’ he answered, ‘and mayhap earlier. How would she show if she was to be scraped?’
He held his long chin betwixt his thumb and forefinger, and stared gapingly at the wondrous object.
‘We might find shelter in her,’ said the cold, haughty voice of Lady Monson, ‘if the sea should break over the island.’
‘Happily suggested!’ I exclaimed. ‘What sort of accommodation will her decks offer?’
‘Grit, I reckon,’ said Head.
‘Well, we can pound a space clear for ourselves, I hope,’ said I; ‘there’s canvas enough yonder on the beach to furnish us with a roof.’
‘And she’ll give us a rise of twenty or thirty feet above the level of the island, sir,’ said Finn, ‘pretty nigh as good as a masthead look-out. A wessel’ll have to pass a long way off not to see her! Well, thank God! says I, for that she’s here. It’s something for a man’s sperrits to catch hold of, ain’t it, Mr. Monson? Lor’ bless me, how beautiful them shells look!’
Cutbill and Dowling now joined us, and stood staring like men discrediting their senses.
‘William,’ said Finn, addressing Cutbill, ‘if ye had her safe moored in the Thames, mate, just as she is, there’d be no need for you to go to sea any more. There’s folks as ’ud pay a pound a head to view such a hobject.’
‘What’s inside of her?’ said Dowling.
‘That’s to be found out,’ answered Cutbill. ‘Smite me, Mr. Monson, sir, if the look-out of exploring of her ain’t good enough to stop a man from being in a hurry to get away from here.’
‘Will not one of the sailors climb on board,’ said Lady Monson, ‘that we may know the state of her decks? We shall require a shelter to-night if a ship does not come to-day and take us off,’ and she sent her black eyes flashing over the sea-line as she spoke, but there was nothing to be seen.
‘How is a man to get aboard?’ exclaimed Dowling; ‘there’s nought to catch hold of, and sailors ain’t flies.’
‘Pile casks one on top of another,’ said I, ‘and then make a pick-a-back, the lightest hand last. I’ll lend my shoulders.’
Finn shook his head. ‘No need to risk our necks, sir. The bows are the lowest part. Nothen’s wanted but a coil of rope. Dowling, you look about the freshest of us, my lad. Step down where the raffle is, will ’ee, and bring along a length of the gear there.’
The fellow trudged to the beach very willingly. Had he been a merchant sailor pure and simple, one might have looked in vain under such conditions for hearty obedience. Mercantile Jack when shipwrecked has a habit of viewing himself as a man freed from all restraint, and instantly privileged by misery to grow mutinous and in all senses obnoxious. But the instincts of the yachtsman come very near to those of the man-of-war’s-man; and indeed, for the matter[300] of that, I would rather be cast away with a crew of men who knew nothing of seafaring outside yachting than with a body of blue-jackets—I mean as regards the promise of respectful behaviour.
Presently Dowling returned with a line coiled over his shoulder. In truth, rope enough to rig a mast with had come ashore with the yards, gaffs, and booms of the yacht, and the sailor had had nothing to do but to clear away as much line as he wanted and bring it to us. Cutbill took the stuff from him and coiled it down afresh over his fingers as though he were about to heave the lead, then nicely calculating distance and height with his eye he sent the fakes flying lasso fashion sheer over the head of the huge, glittering, fossilised structure where the incrustation forked out in a manner to suggest the existence of what the ancient mariner termed a ‘beak,’ and the end was caught by Dowling, who had stepped round the bows of the craft to receive it.
‘Now up you go, my lad,’ shouted Cutbill, and the sailor, who was of a light figure, mounted as nimbly as a monkey, hand over hand; three of us holding on to the rope t’other side to secure it for him. He gained the deck and looked about him with an air of stupid wonder.
‘Why, it’s a plantation!’ he shouted; ‘young cork-trees a-sprouting and flowers as big as targets! vegetables right fore and aft, and a dead grampus under the break of the poop!’
‘Avast!’ bawled Cutbill, ‘tarn to and see if the stump of that there foremast is sound.’
The spar was stepped well forward, after the ancient custom, with a slight inclination towards the bow. Dowling made for it with his mouth open, staring around and looking behind him as he went, and treading as though he moved on broken glass. He drew close to the shell-covered shaft that glowed with the tints of a dying dolphin and glittered and coruscated with the richness and variety of dyes beyond imagination to every movement that one made. After briefly inspecting it he sang out: ‘Strong enough to moor a line-of-battle ship to, sir!’
‘Then make the end of the line fast there,’ roared Cutbill.
This was done, and up went the burly salt, puffing and blowing, swinging a crimson visage round to us as he fended himself off the lacerating heads of the shelly armour with his toes. He got over the side, stood staring as the other had, and then, tossing up his hands, shouted down, ‘Looks like that piece, capt’n, that’s wrote down in the Bible ’bout the Gard’n of Eden. Only wants Adam and Eve, damn me! Never could ha’ dreamed of such a thing. And it’s the bottom of the sea too. Why, it’s worth being drownded if it’s all like this down there.’
‘Any hatches?’ cried Finn.
‘Can’t see nothen for shells and vegetables.’
‘Well, just take a look round, will ’ee, and let’s know if there’s shelter to be got for the ladies.’
Dowling sang out, ‘Main-deck’s pretty nigh awash, but there’s[301] a raised quarter-deck, and it’s dry from the break of it to right aft.’
‘She will be full of water,’ said I to Finn. ‘Why not scuttle her? There are a couple of augers in the carpenter’s chest. Is that growth to be pierced, though?’
‘Can but try, sir,’ he answered.
‘Well,’ said I, ‘one thing is certain. The sun will be standing overhead presently. There’s no wind, and we must absolutely contrive to protect the ladies from the pouring heat. There’s but one thing to do for the moment, that I can see. We must manage to rig up a sail aboard to serve as an awning. But how are the ladies to be got into her?’
Lady Monson and Laura stood close, listening anxiously.
‘Why,’ answered Finn, after thinking for a few moments, ‘we must rig up a derrick. There’s blocks enough knocking about amongst the raffle down there to make a whip with. The consarn’ll sarve also to hoist the provisions up by. I allow that if once we get stowed up there, there’ll be nothen to hurt us so far as seas goes in the heaviest gale that can come on to blow.’
‘I shall be miserable until I am on board,’ said Lady Monson. ‘It is dreadful to be dependent upon this low rock for one’s life. The tide may rise.’
I met Laura’s sad and wondering eyes, and divined her thoughts. The instinct of self-preservation was indeed a very powerful development in her ladyship’s bosom. Is she not ashamed to let us all see how anxious she is about her life, Laura’s glance at me seemed to say, after the sufferings and death her behaviour has brought about—her husband drowned, the unhappy man she abandoned her home for floating in the depths beyond the horizon there——?
Cutbill descended, followed by Dowling.
‘’Tis an amazing sight, surely,’ he exclaimed, wringing the perspiration in a shower from his forehead. ‘The decks is flinty hard with shell, but I reckon a space is to be cleared just under the break of the poop, and it feels almost cool up there arter these here rocks. There’s a porpoise aft as’ll want chucking overboard. ’Tain’t no grampus, as Dowling says. Only I tell ye, capt’n, that there deck’s a sight to make a man see twenty times more’n he looks at.’
Finn’s spirits had improved through his having something else to think of than the loss of the yacht and the drowning of her people. He was fetching his breath, too, with comparative ease, and only at long intervals brought his hand to his side. This improvement in him greatly cheered me. I liked the rough, homely sailor much, and his death would have been a blow. The man Johnson had by this time made shift to rise and join us, but he walked with a weak step and looked very sadly, as though a deal of the life had been washed out of him in his struggle to fetch the[302] shore. He was of no use to us, and I told him to go and sit in the shadow of the hull out of the blaze of the sun.
Finn then called a council: Cutbill, myself, Dowling, and Head gathered round him, and very briefly and with but little talk we concerted our plans. We were all agreed that the astonishing shell-armoured fabric could be made to yield us a tolerably secure asylum, and that the elevation of its deck would enable us to command a wide view of the sea, and that therefore it was our business forthwith to convey all that we could recover from the yacht into her. I went to work with the rest and toiled hard. The labour mainly consisted in dragging and pulling, for we had to bring a spare boom to the galleon from the beach to serve as a derrick for hoisting; then such sails as had been washed ashore; then the provisions. It was like drawing teeth; everything seemed to weigh about five times more than it should. The work was made the harder, moreover, by the character of the ground. Had the surface been smooth as earth is we could have tramped with tolerable briskness; but our staggering march to the galleon under heavy loads was converted into a very treadmill exercise by our having to dodge the little holes large enough to neatly fit the leg to as high as the knee, or the wider yawns and great wells of which some were big enough to receive the whole body of us, goods and all, in one gulp. I had by this time ascertained that the water in the larger pores and holes was too salt to drink. It was in the smaller hollows only, and these indeed amongst the shallowest, that the water lay scarce brackish. In short, the fall of rain, great as it was, had not lasted long enough to drown the brine in the deeper wells. This was an important discovery, for the fierce sun would soon dry up the shallow apertures; and had we taken for granted that the contents of the deeper ones were fit to drink, we should have been brought face to face with thirst.
But happily nearly the whole of the yacht lay in piecemeal before us. All that had been in her forepart, which yet stood, had washed out and rolled ashore or stranded within wading distance. Our fresh water had been carried in casks, as I believe was the custom for the most part in those days; some of the barrels had bulged, but a few had been swept high and dry. There were empty water casks, moreover, which had floated up, and these we rolled aside to be filled the moment we had leisure to devote to that task. There were no bodies to be seen, and I was thankful for it. The sharks no doubt had been put to flight by the explosion, but they would not be long in returning; and indeed I gathered they were in force again, though I saw nothing resembling a fin, from the circumstance of none of the dead, saving the few forms which Cutbill and Dowling had slipped into the sea on the other side of the island, having drifted in with the wreckage.
The leaden curtain had drawn far down into the west; two-thirds of the heavens now were a dazzle of silver blue with a high sun looking down out of it with a roasting eye, and the water a[303] surface of shivering glory south and east and edged crape-like in the west, but not a cloud of the size of a thumb-nail anywhere save there. A thin line of surf purred delicately upon the gradual slope of sulphur-lined beach, with a weak, metallic hissing sounding along the length of it as the sparkling ripple slipped up and down upon the honeycombed beach. The remains of the yacht’s bows lay gaunt and motionless some distance down. Her gilt figure-head glowed in the sunshine and made a brightness under it that rode like a fragment of sunbeam upon the delicate lift of sea rolling inwards. A plank or two rounding into the stern were gone and you could see daylight through her. It seemed incredible that so stout a little craft should have gone to pieces as she had; but then the swell had been heavy and the ground on which she beat iron-hard, and then again her scantling was but that of a pleasure vessel, though the staunchest of its kind.
Meanwhile I conveyed, with the help of Cutbill, into the shadow that was cast by the galleon, as I will call her, Laura’s box of wearing apparel which we had fallen in with early in the morning. Oddly enough it was the only trunk or portmanteau that had come ashore. Some sailors’ chests had floated in, but nothing belonging to any of us aft saving this box of Laura’s and a small chest of drawers out of Wilfrid’s cabin, one drawer gone, and the others containing articles of no use to us, such as gloves, neck-ties, writing material, manuscripts sodden and illegible. The removing her clothes from the box and spreading them to dry found Laura occupation and something else therefore to think of than our miserable condition. Her sister very early had withdrawn to the shadow cast by the galleon, and there sat—Johnson lying a little way from her—apparently stirless for a whole half-hour together; as much a fossil to the eye as the wondrous structure that sheltered her. The black cloud of hair upon her back, her spectral white face and dark eyes gave me an odd fancy of her as the figure-head of the mysterious fabric that had risen in thunder and flame from the green stillness of its ocean tomb where it had been lying so long that the mere thought of the years put a shiver into one, spite of the broiling orb that hung overhead. Heavens! I remember thinking in some interval of toil, during which I paused, panting, with my eye directed towards the galleon—figure a lonely man coming ashore here on a moonlit night and beholding that woman seated as she now sits, looking as she now looks, stirless as she now is, in the shadow of that shell-covered structure shimmering like a lunar rainbow to the moonbeam!
It was like passing from death to life to send the gaze from Lady Monson to Laura as the little sweetheart busily flitted from sunshine to shadow, spreading the garments to the light, her hair flashing and fading as she passed from the radiance into the violet shade, her figure the fairer to my enamoured eyes, maybe, for the shipwrecked aspect of her attire that enriched by fitful and fasci[304]nating revelations the beauty of her form by an art quite out of the reach of the nimblest of dressmaking fingers. Her spirits and much of her strength seemed to have returned to her. Often she would look my way and wave her hand to me.
Half an hour after noon by the sun—for my watch had stopped when I tumbled overboard, and so had Laura’s and Lady Monson’s—we all assembled under the overhanging counter of the galleon for a midday meal. The sun was almost overhead, and there was very little shadow; which forced us to sit tolerably close together, and I could see that her ladyship did not very much relish this intimate association with the rough sailors; but it was either for her or for them to sit out in the scorching, blinding light, and as she did not offer to go I insisted on the poor fellows keeping their places, though Finn and Cutbill shuffled as though they were for backing away. She perceived my indifference to her sensitiveness and shot a look of hate at me. However, I was not so insensible as she imagined, for I was very careful to scarcely glance at her; for there she sat, unveiled, her head uncovered, close to, to be peered at, if one chose, as if she were a picture or a statue, and I would not pain what weak sense of shame, what haughty confusion there might be in her by a single lift of my eyes to her face, saving when I accosted her or she me. I observed that the sailors were studious in their disregard of her. There was not a man of them I dare say but would have squinted curiously at her out of the corner of his eyes on board the yacht had she shown herself on deck; but here it would have been taking an unfair advantage of her; their instincts as men governed them, and no fine gentleman could ever have exhibited a higher quality of breeding than did these rough Jacks in this respect, as they squatted munching biscuit and potted meat and handing on to one another the jar of sherry and water.
But often, though swiftly and very respectfully too, their glances would go to Laura. They would look as though they found something to hearten them in her sweet pale face, her kind smile, her pretty efforts to bear up.
‘There ought to be a ship passing here before long,’ said Finn, with a slow stare seawards; ‘’taint as if this here island was right in with the African coast.’
‘The “’Liza Robbins” should be looked out for, capt’n,’ said Cutbill; ‘she was dead in our wake when we drawed ahead, steering our course to a hair.’
‘Strange that all the yacht’s boats should have disappeared,’ said I.
‘Hammered into staves, your honour,’ said Finn; ‘ye may see bits of them on the beach.’
‘I couldn’t swear to it,’ said Johnson languidly; ‘it was so blooming dark; but I’ve got a notion of seeing some of the men run aft when the yacht struck, as though making for one of the boats.’
‘I was knocked down by a rush of several sailors,’ said I.
‘If any of our chaps got away in a boat, why aren’t they here?’ asked Dowling.
‘Why, man, consider the size of this island,’ I exclaimed; ‘a few strokes of the oars, the boat heading out, or to the eastwards, say, would suffice to send them clear of this pin’s-head of rock, and then once to leeward they’d blow away. But we need not trouble to speculate: I fear nobody has escaped but ourselves.’
Finn shook his head with a face of misery, putting down what he was eating and fixing his eyes, that had moistened on a sudden, on the rock he sat on.
‘How long will it be before we enter the ship?’ asked Lady Monson.
‘Oh, we shall all be aboard before sundown, I don’t doubt,’ said I.
‘Will you not have some signal ready in case a vessel pass?’ she demanded.
‘We’ll stack the materials for a bonfire, but there is much to be done meanwhile,’ said I.
I believed she would have addressed Cutbill or Finn rather than me, but for the downright insolence her disregard of my presence would have signified. No doubt she hated me for being her husband’s cousin, for joining in his chase of her, for having helped in the duel that cost the Colonel his life, for the part I had acted aboard the ‘’Liza Robbins,’ and for being a witness of her defeat and shame and humiliation. Yes, such a woman as Lady Monson would violently abhor a man for much less than this. Why should poor Wilfrid have been drowned and she spared? I remember thinking. The world would surely have been the better off for the saving of one honest heart out of the yacht’s forecastle than for Lady Monson’s deliverance. But reflections of this kind were absurdly ill-timed. I started from them on meeting Laura’s gaze pensively watching me, and then sprang to my feet to the perception of the overwhelming reality that confronted us all.
‘Come, lads,’ said I, ‘if you are sufficiently rested shall we turn to?’
They instantly rose; Johnson staggered on to his legs, but I told him to keep where he was.
‘You’ll be hearty again to-morrow,’ said I, ‘and we are strong enough to manage without you.’
He knuckled his forehead with a grateful smile and lay down again.
The work ran us deep into the afternoon. There did not seem much to be done, but somehow it occupied a deal of time. The heat was a terrible hindrance; it fell a dead calm, the atmosphere pressed with a tingling vibration to the skin and swam in a swooning way, till sometimes on pausing and bringing my hand to my brow I would see the hot blue horizon beginning to revolve as though it were some huge teetotum with myself perched on the[306] top of the middle of it. With a vast deal of trouble and after a long time a boom was secured to the stump of the galleon’s foremast with a block at the end of it, through which a line was rove. There had washed ashore close to the great dead shark down on the beach a small arm-chair of red velvet that had formerly stood in Laura’s cabin. Cutbill spied it and brought it to Finn, and said that it would do to hoist the ladies on board by. It was accordingly carried to the galleon, and made fast to one end of the whip. Dowling then climbed on board whilst the others of us stood by to sway away.
‘Will you go up first, Lady Monson?’ said I.
She coldly inclined her head and came to the chair, sweeping her hair backwards over her shoulders with a white, scared look at the height up which she was to be hoisted. I snugged her in the chair, and passed the end of a piece of line round her, and all being ready, we ran her up hand over hand till she was on a level with the shell-bristling rail of the galleon’s forecastle. Here Dowling caught hold of the chair and drew it inboards, singing out to us to lower away, and a few moments after the chair was floating over the side empty.
We then sent Laura aloft. She smiled at me as she seated herself, but there was a deal of timidity in her sweet eyes, and her smile vanished as if by magic the moment the chair was off the ground. However, she soared in perfect safety and was received by Dowling, and no sooner had she sent a look along the decks than her head shone over the side and she called down to me, ‘Oh, Mr. Monson, it is exquisite—a very Paradise of shells and sea flowers!’
‘Will you go up now, sir?’ said Finn.
‘Not yet,’ I replied; ‘I can be useful down here. Let us get Johnson hoisted out of the way first.’
Cutbill brought the poor fellow round to the chair and we sent him up. Dowling remained on the vessel to receive what we whipped up aloft to him, and in the course of an hour from the time of swaying Lady Monson aboard we had hoisted all the provisions we had brought into the shadow of the galleon—Laura’s box of clothes, the yacht’s foresail and fore-staysail, a bundle of mattresses that had washed out of the forecastle, the cask of sherry, two casks of fresh water, the carpenter’s chest, and other matters which I cannot now recall. This was very well indeed, but we were nigh-hand spent, and had to fling ourselves down upon the pumice rocks to rest and breathe ere tailing on to the whip again to hoist one or another of us up.
The sun was now in the west, his light a rich crimson and the sea a sheet of molten gold polished as quicksilver under him. The galleon’s shadow lay broad on her port side, and in it we sprawled with scarlet faces and dripping brows.
‘No chance of being picked up in such weather as this, sir,’ said Finn, who had worked as hard as any of us and seemed the[307] better for his labours, though I observed that his breath was caught at times as if by a spasm or shooting pain in the side.
‘We must have patience,’ said I, ‘but at the worst ’tis a tolerably comfortable shipwreck, Finn. We are well stocked, and there’s a deal more yet to be had if the sea will keep quiet. We’re not ashore upon the Greenland coast, all ice ahead of us and all famine astern.’
‘No, thank the Lord,’ quoth Cutbill; ‘it’s a bad shipwreck when a man daresn’t finger his nose for fear of bringing it away from his face. Better too much sun, says I, than none at all.’
‘And then again,’ said I, with a glance up at the marvellous, shell-encrusted conformation that towered with swelling bilge over our heads, ‘here’s as good a house as one needs to live in till something heaves in view.’
‘I’m for scuttling her at once, capt’n,’ cried Head; ‘she’ll hold a vast o’ water, and the sooner she’s holed the sooner she’ll be empty. Who’s to tell what’s inside of her?’
Cutbill ran his eyes thirstily over the huge fossil. ‘She was a lump of a craft for her day,’ said he, ‘and when wessels of her size put to sea they was commonly nearly all rich ships, so I’ve heerd.’
‘Head, you’re right,’ cried Finn. ‘Ye shall be the first to spike her—if ’ee can. On deck there!’
‘Hillo!’ answered Dowling, putting his purple, whiskered face over the line of shells.
‘Send down the augers and a chopper out of the carpenter’s chest.’
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ he answered, and in a few moments down came the tools.
‘Before you make a start,’ said I, ‘hoist me aboard, will you?’
I planted myself in the chair, was cleverly run up, got hold of Dowling’s hand, and stepped on to the deck.
I was prepared to witness a rich and gorgeous show, but what I now viewed went leagues beyond any imagination I could have conceived of the reality. The ancient fabric had four decks, that is to say, the forecastle, the main-deck that was like a well, a short raised quarter-deck, and abaft all a poop, going to the narrow, castle-like crown of the head of the stern. These decks, together with the inside of the bulwarks, were thickly encrusted with shells of every imaginable hue and shape and size; but in addition there flourished densely amongst these shells a wonderful surface of marine growths, not so dense but that the shells could be seen between, yet plentiful enough to submit each deck to the eye as a glorious marine parterre. It was like entering upon a scene of fairyland; there were growths of a coralline appearance of many colours, from a Tyrian dye to a delicate opalescent azure, huge bulbs like bloated cucumbers, flowers resembling immense daisies, with coral-hard spikes projecting from them like the rays which dart from the sun; long trailing plants like prostrate creepers,[308] others erect, as tall as my knee, resembling ferns, of a grace beyond all expression, with their plume-like archings, blossoms of white and carnation, green bayonet-like spikes, weeds shaped to the aspect of purple lizards so that one watched to see if they crawled; great round vegetables bigger than the African toad-stools, some crimson, some of cream colour, some barred with crimson on a yellow ground; here and there lay fish big and little, of shapes I had never before beheld, whose vividness seemed to have lost nothing through their being dead. Against the front of the quarterdeck was the livid body of a porpoise. There was scarcely a vegetable growth but that might have been wrought of steel for the unyieldingness of it. I kicked at one toadstool-like thing and my foot recoiled as though it had smote a little pillar of iron. The picture was made the more amazing by the red light of the declining sun, for every white gleam had its tinge of ruby, and what was deep of hue glowed gloriously rich. The two shafts of masts sparkled like the jewelled fingers of a woman. And the deep sea smell! The atmosphere was charged with an odour of brine and weed of a pungency and quality that one felt to be possible only to a revelation from some deepest and most secret recess of the deep. The water that had covered the main-deck when Dowling and Cutbill had first inspected the craft was fast draining away, but the growths there and the shells were still soaked and gave a wet surface for the light of the sun to flash up in, and the whole space sparkled with the glory of the rainbow, but so much brighter than the brightest rainbow, that the eye, after lingering, came away weeping with the dazzle.