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MY SHIPMATE LOUISE

VOL. I.




NEW NOVELS AT ALL LIBRARIES.


  A FELLOW OF TRINITY. By ALAN ST. AUBYN and WALT WHEELER. 3 vols.

  THE WORD AND THE WILL. By JAMES PAYN. 3 vols.

  AUNT ABIGAIL DYKES. By GEORGE RANDOLPH. 1 vol.

  A WARD OF THE GOLDEN GATE. By BRET HARTE. 1 vol.

  RUFFINO. By OUIDA. 1 vol.


London: CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly, W.




  MY SHIPMATE LOUISE

  The Romance of a Wreck

  BY

  W. CLARK RUSSELL

  [Illustration]

  IN THREE VOLUMES

  VOL. I.


  London
  CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
  1890




  PRINTED BY
  SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
  LONDON




  TO

  LEOPOLD HUDSON, ESQ.

  _Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England
  Warden of Middlesex Hospital College_

  IN GRATITUDE




  CONTENTS
  OF
  THE FIRST VOLUME


  CHAPTER                              PAGE

     I. DOWN CHANNEL                      1

    II. THE FRENCH LUGGER                20

   III. MY FELLOW PASSENGERS             43

    IV. LOUISE TEMPLE                    60

     V. A MYSTERIOUS VOICE               84

    VI. WE LOSE A MAN                   108

   VII. A SEA FUNERAL                   130

  VIII. A STRANGE CARGO                 161

    IX. A SECRET BLOW                   182

     X. THE HUMOURS OF AN INDIAMAN      203

    XI. A STRANGE SAIL                  223

   XII. A STORM OF WIND                 246

  XIII. FIRE!                           270

   XIV. CRABB                           292




MY SHIPMATE LOUISE




CHAPTER I

DOWN CHANNEL


We had left Gravesend at four o’clock in the morning, and now, at
half-past eight o’clock in the evening, we were off the South Foreland,
the ship on a taut bowline heading on a due down Channel course.

It was a September night, with an edge of winter in the gusts and
blasts which swept squall-like into the airy darkling hollows of the
canvas. There was a full moon, small as a silver cannon-ball, with
a tropical greenish tinge in its icy sparkling, and the scud came
sweeping up over it in shreds and curls and feathers of vapour, sailing
up dark from where the land of France was, and whitening out into
a gossamer delicacy of tint as it soared into and fled through the
central silver splendour. The weight of the whole range of Channel was
in the run of the surge that flashed into masses of white water from
the ponderous bow of the Indiaman as she stormed and crushed her way
along, the tacks of her courses groaning to every windward roll, as
though the clew of each sail were the hand of a giant seeking to uproot
the massive iron bolt that confined the corner of the groaning cloths
to the deck.

The towering foreland showed in a pale and windy heap on the starboard
quarter. The land ran in a sort of elusive faintness along our beam,
with the Dover lights hanging in the pallid shadow like a galaxy of
fireflies: beyond them a sort of trembling nebulous sheen, marking
Folkestone; and on high in the clear dusk over the quarter you saw the
Foreland light like some wild and yellow star staring down upon the sea
clear of the flight of the wing-like scud.

The ship was the _Countess Ida_, a well-known Indiaman of her day--now
so long ago that it makes me feel as though I were two centuries old
to be able to relate that I was a hearty young fellow in those times.
She was bound to Bombay. Most of the passengers had come aboard at
Gravesend, I amongst them; and here we were now thrashing our way into
the widening waters of the Channel, mighty thankful--those of us who
were not sea-sick, I mean--that there had come a shift of wind when the
southern limb of the Goodwin Sands was still abreast, to enable us to
keep our anchors at the cathead and save us a heart-wearying spell of
detention in the Downs.

The vessel looked noble by moonlight; she was showing a maintopgallant
sail to the freshening wind, and the canvas soared to high aloft
in shadowy spaces, which came and went in a kind of winking as the
luminary leapt from the edge of the hurrying clouds into some little
lagoon of soft indigo, flashing down a very rain of silver fires,
till the long sparkling beam travelling over the foaming heads of the
seas, like a spoke of a revolving wheel, was extinguished in a breath
by the sweep of a body of vapour over the lovely planet. I stood at
the rail that ran athwart the break of the poop, surveying this grand
night-picture of the outward-bound Indiaman. From time to time there
would be a roaring of water off her weather-bow, that glanced in the
moonshine in a huge fountain of prismatic crystals. The figures of a
couple of seamen keeping a look-out trudged the weather-side of the
forecastle, their shadows at their feet starting out upon the white
plank to some quick and brilliant hurl of moonlight, clear as a sketch
in ink, upon white paper. Amidships, forward, loomed up the big galley,
with a huge long-boat stowed before it roofed with spare booms; on
either hand rose the high bulwarks with three carronades of a side
stealing out of the dusk between the tall defences of the ship like
the shapes of beasts crouching to obtain a view of the sea through the
port-holes. A red ray of light came aslant from the galley and touched
with its rusty radiance a few links of the huge chain cable that was
ranged along the decks, a coil of rope hanging upon a belaying pin,
and a fragment of bulwarks stanchion. Now and again a seaman would
pass through this light, the figure of him coming out red against the
greenish silver in the atmosphere. A knot of passengers hung together
close under the weather poop ladder, with a broad white space of the
quarter-deck sloping from their feet to the lee waterways, whence at
intervals there would come a sound of choking and gasping as the heave
of the ship brought the dark Channel surge brimming to the scupper
holes. The growling hum of the voices of the men blended in a strange
effect upon the ear with the shrill singing of the wind in the rigging
and the ceaseless washing noises over the side and the long-drawn
creaking sounds which arise from all parts of a ship struggling against
a head sea under a press of canvas.

Aft on the poop where I was standing the vessel had something of a
deserted look. The pilot had been dropped off Deal; the officer of the
watch (the chief mate) was stumping the weather-side of the deck from
the ladder to abreast of the foremost skylight; the dark figure of the
captain swung in a sort of pendulum-tramping from the mizzen rigging to
the grating abaft the wheel. Dim as a distant firebrand over the port
quarter, windily flickering upon the stretch of throbbing waters, shone
the lantern of the lightship off the South Sand Head; and it was odd to
mark how it rose and fell upon the speeding night sky to the swift yet
stately pitching of our ship, with the figure of the man at the helm
somehow showing the vaguer for it, spite of the shining of the binnacle
lamp flinging a little golden haze round about the compass stand, abaft
which the shape of the fellow showed vague as the outline of a ghost.

Ha! thought I, _this_ is being at sea now indeed! Why, though we were
in narrow waters yet, there was such a note of ocean yearning in
the thunderous wash of the weather billows sweeping along the bends
that, but for the pale glimmer of the line of land trending away to
starboard, I might easily have imagined the whole waters of the great
Atlantic to be under our bow.

It was a bit chilly, and I caught myself hugging my peacoat to me with
a half-formed resolution to make for my cabin, where there were yet
some traps of mine remaining to be stowed away. But I lingered--lover
of all sea-effects, as I then was and still am--to watch a fine brig
blowing past us along to the Downs, the strong wind gushing fair over
her quarter, and her canvas rising in marble-like curves to the tiny
royals; every cloth glancing in pearl to the dance of the moon amongst
the clouds, every rope upon her glistening out into silver wire, with
the foam, white as sifted snow, lifting to her hawse-pipes to the
clipper shearing of her keen stem, and not a light aboard of her but
what was kindled by the luminary in the glass and brass about her decks
as she went rolling past us delicate as a vision, pale as steam, yet of
an exquisite grace as determinable as a piece of painting on ivory.

I walked aft to the companion hatch and entered the cuddy, or, as it is
now called, the saloon. The apartment was the width of the ship, and
was indeed a very splendid and spacious state-cabin, with a bulkhead
at the extremity under the wheel, where the captain’s bedroom was, and
a berth alongside of it, where the skipper worked out his navigation
along with the officers, and where the midshipmen went to school. There
were also two berths right forward close against the entrance to the
cuddy by way of the quarter-deck, occupied by the first and second
mates; otherwise, the interior was as clear as a ballroom, and it was
like entering a brilliantly illuminated pavilion ashore, to pass out
of the windy dusk of the night and the flying moonshine of it into the
soft brightness of oil-flames burning in handsome lamps of white and
gleaming metal, duplicated by mirrors, with hand-paintings between and
polished panels in which the radiance cloudily rippled. A long table
went down the centre of this cuddy, and over it were the domes of the
skylights, in which were many plants and flowers of beauty swinging
in pots, and globes of fish and silver swinging trays. Right through
the heart of the interior came the shaft of the mizzen mast, rich with
chiselled configurations, and of a delicate hue; a handsome piano
stood lashed to the deck abaft the trunk of giant spar. The planks
were finely carpeted, and sofas and arm-chairs ran the length of this
glittering saloon on either side of it.

There were a few people assembled at the fore-end of the table as I
made my way to the hatch whose wide steps led to the sleeping berths
below. It was not hard to perceive that one of them was an East Indian
military gentleman whose liver was on fire through years of curry. His
white whiskers of the wire-like inflexibility of a cat’s, stood out on
either side his lemon-coloured cheeks; his little blood-shot eyes of
indigo sparkled under overhanging brows where the hair lay thick like
rolls of cotton-wool. This gentleman I knew to be Colonel Bannister,
and as I cautiously made my way along--for the movements of the decks
were staggering enough to oblige me to tread warily--I gathered that
he was ridiculing the medical profession to Dr. Hemmeridge, the ship’s
surgeon, for its inability to prescribe for sea-sickness.

‘It iss der nerves,’ I heard a fat Dutch gentleman say--afterwards
known to me as Peter Hemskirk, manager of a firm in Bombay.

‘Nerves!’ sneered the colonel, with a glance at the Dutchman’s
waistcoat. ‘Don’t you know the difference between the nerves and the
stomach, sir?’

‘Same thing,’ exclaimed Dr. Hemmeridge soothingly; ‘sea-sickness means
the head, any way; and pray, colonel, what are the brains but’----

‘Ha! ha!’ roared the colonel, interrupting him; ‘_there_ I have you. If
it be the brains only which are affected, why, then, ha! ha! no wonder
Mynheer here doesn’t suffer, though it’s his first voyage, he says.’

But my descent of the steps carried me out of earshot of this
interesting talk. My cabin was well aft. There was a fairly wide
corridor, and the berths were ranged on either hand of it. From some of
them, as I made my way along, came in muffled sounds various notes of
lamentation and suffering. A black woman, with a ring through her nose
and her head draped in white, sat on the deck in front of the closed
door of a berth, moaning in a sea-sick way over a baby that she rocked
in her arms, and that was crying at the top of its pipes. The door of
a cabin immediately opposite opened, and a young fellow with a ghastly
face putting his head out exclaimed in accents strongly suggestive of
nausea: ‘I thay, confound it! thtop that noithe, will you? The rolling
ith bad enough without _that_ thindy. Thteward!’ The ship gave a lurch,
and he swung out, but instantly darted back again, being indeed but
half clothed: ‘I thay, are _you_ the thteward?’

‘No,’ said I. ‘Keep on singing out. Somebody’ll come to you.’

‘Won’t they thmother that woman?’ he shouted, and he would have said
more, but a sudden kickup of the ship slammed his cabin door for him,
and the next moment my ear caught a sound that indicated too surely
his rashness in leaving his bunk.

I entered my berth, and found the lamp alight in it, and the young
gentleman who was to share the cabin with me sitting in his bedstead,
that was above mine, dangling his legs over the edge of it, and gazing
with a disordered countenance upon the deck. I had chatted with him
during the afternoon and had learnt who he was. Indeed, his name was
in big letters upon his portmanteau--‘The Hon. Stephen Colledge;’ and
incidentally he had told me that he was a son of Lord Sandown, and
that he was bound to India on a shooting tour. He was a good-looking
young man, with fair whiskers, white teeth, a genial smile, yet with
something of affectation in his way of speaking.

‘It’s doocid rough, isn’t it, Mr. Dugdale?’ said he; ‘and isn’t it
raining?’

‘No,’ said I.

‘Oh, but look at the glass here,’ he exclaimed, indicating the scuttle
or porthole, the thick glass of which showed gleaming, but black as
coal against the night outside.

‘Why,’ said I, ‘the wet there is the sea; it is spray; nothing but
spray.’

‘Hang all waves!’ he said in a low voice. ‘Why the dickens can’t the
ocean always be calm? If I’d have known that this ship pitched so, I’d
have waited for a steadier vessel. Will you do me the kindness to lift
the lid of that portmanteau? You’ll find a flask of brandy in it. Hang
me if I like to move. Sorry now I didn’t bring a cot, though they’re
doocid awkward things to get in and out of.’

I found the flask, and gave it to him, and he took a pull at it. I
declined his offer of a dram, and went to work to stow away some odds
and ends which were in my trunk.

‘Don’t you feel ill?’ said he.

‘No,’ said I.

‘Oh, ah, I remember now!’ he exclaimed; ‘you were a sailor once,
weren’t you?’

‘Yes; I had a couple of years of it.’

‘Wish _I’d_ been a sailor, I know,’ said he. ‘I mean, after I’d given
it up. As to _being_ a sailor--merciful goodness! think of four,
perhaps five months of _this_.’

‘Oh, you’ll be as good a sailor as ever a seaman amongst us in a day or
two,’ said I encouragingly.

‘Don’t feel like it now, though,’ he exclaimed. ‘Let’s see: I think
you said you were going out to do some painting?--Oh no! I beg pardon:
it was a chap named Emmett who told me that. You--you----’ He looked
at me with a slightly inebriated cock of the head, from which I might
infer that the ‘pull’ he had taken at his flask was by no means his
first ‘drain’ within the hour.

‘No,’ said I, with a laugh; ‘I am going out to see an old relative up
country. And not more for that than for the fun of a voyage.’

‘The _fun_ of the voyage!’ he echoed with a stupid face; then with a
sudden brightening up of his manner, though his gloomy countenance
quickly returned to him, he exclaimed, ‘I say, Dugdale--beg pardon, you
know; no good in _mistering_ a chap that you’re going to sleep with for
four or five months--call me Colledge, old fellow--but I say, though,
seen anything more of that ripping girl since dinner? By George! what
eyes, eh?’

He drew his legs up, and with a slight groan composed himself in a
posture for sleep, manifestly heedless of any answer I might make to
his question.

I lingered awhile in the berth, and then, filling a pipe, mounted to
the saloon, and made my way to the quarter-deck to smoke in the shelter
of the recess in the cuddy front. Colonel Bannister lay sprawling upon
a sofa, holding a tumbler of brandy grog. There were other passengers
in the cuddy, scattered, and all of them grimly silent, staring hard
at the lamps, yet with something of vacancy in their regard, as though
their thoughts were elsewhere. As I stepped on to the quarter-deck,
the cries and chorusing of men aloft, came sounding through the strong
and hissing pouring of the wind between the masts and through the
harsh seething of the seas, which the bows of the ship were smiting
into snowstorms as she went sullenly ploughing through the water with
the weather-leech of the maintopgallant-sail trembling in the green
glancings of the moonlight like the fly of a flag in a breeze of wind.
They were taking a reef in the fore and mizzen topsails. The chief
mate, Mr. Prance, from time to time, would sing out an order over my
head that was answered by a hoarse ‘Ay, ay, sir,’ echoing out of the
gloom in which the fore-part of the ship was plunged. I lighted my
pipe and sat myself down on the coamings of the booby hatch to enjoy
a smoke. I was alone, and this moon-touched flying Channel night-scene
carried my memory back to the times when I was a sailor, when I had
paced the deck of such another vessel as this, as a midshipman of her.
It seemed a long time ago, yet it was no more than six years either.
The old professional instinct was quickened in me by the voices of the
fellows aloft, till I felt as though it were my watch on deck, that I
was skulking under the break of the poop here, and that I ought to be
aloft jockeying a lee yard-arm or dangling to windward on the flemish
horse.

Presently all was quiet on high, and by the windy sheen in the
atmosphere, caused by the commingling of white waters and the frequent
glance of the moon through some rent in the ragged scud, I could make
out the figures of the fellows on the fore descending the shrouds. A
little while afterwards a deep sea voice broke out into a strange wild
song, that was caught up and re-echoed in a hurricane chorus by the
tail of men hauling upon the halliards to masthead the yard. It was
a proper sort of note to fit such a night as that. A minute after, a
chorus of a like gruffness but of a different melody resounded on the
poop, where they were mastheading the topsail yard after reefing it.
The combined notes flung a true oceanic character into the picture of
the darkling Indiaman swelling and rolling and pitching in floating
launches through it, with her wide pinions rising in spaces of
faintness to the scud, and the black lines of her royal yards sheering
to and fro against the moon that, when she showed, seemed to reel
amidst the rushing wings of vapour to the wild dance of our mastheads.
The songs of the sailors, the clear shrill whistling of a boatswain’s
mate forward, the orders uttered quickly by the chief officer, the
washing noises of the creaming surges, the sullen shouting of the wind
in the rigging resembling the sulky breaker-like roar of a wood of tall
trees swept by a gale--all this made one feel that one was at sea in
earnest.

I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and went on to the poop. The land
still showed very dimly to starboard, with here and there little
oozings of dim radiance that might mark a village or a town. You could
see to the horizon, where the water showed in a sort of greenish
blackness with some speck of flame of a French lighthouse over the
port quarter, and the September clouds soaring up off the edge of the
sea like puffs and coils of smoke from a thousand factory chimneys down
there, and now and again a bright star glancing out from amongst them
as they came swiftly floating up to the moon, turning of a silvery
white as they neared the glorious planet.

There were windows in the cuddy front, and as I glanced through one
of them I saw the captain come down the companion steps into the
brightly lighted saloon and seat himself at the table, where in a
moment he was joined by the fiery-eyed little colonel. Decanters and
glasses were placed by one of the stewards on a swing-tray, and the
scene then had something of a homely look spite of the cuddy’s aspect
of comparative desertion. Captain Keeling, I think, was about the
most sailorly-looking man I ever remember meeting. I had heard of him
ashore, and learnt that he had used the sea for upwards of forty-five
years. He had served in every kind of craft, and had obtained great
reputation amongst owners and underwriters for his defence and
preservation of an Indiaman he was in command of that was attacked in
the Bay of Bengal by a heavily armed French picaroon full of men. Cups
and swords and services of plate and purses of money were heaped upon
him for his conduct in that affair; and indeed in his way he was a sort
of small Commodore Dance.

I looked at him with some interest as he sat beside the colonel with
the full light of the lamp over against him shining upon his face and
figure. There had been little enough to see of him during the day,
and it was not until we dropped the pilot that he showed himself.
His countenance was crimsoned with long spells of tropic weather,
and hardened into ruggedness like the face of a rock by the years of
gales he had gone through. He was about sixty years of age; and his
short-cropped hair was as white as silver, with a thin line of whisker
of a like fleecy sort slanting from his ear to the middle of his cheek.
His nose was shaped like the bowl of a clay-pipe, and was of a darker
red than the rest of his face. His small sea-blue eyes were sunk deep,
as though from the effect of long staring to windward; and almost
hidden as they were by the heavy ridge of silver eyebrow, they seemed
to be no more than gimlet holes in his head for the admission of light.
He had thrown open his peacoat, and discovered a sort of uniform under
it: a buff-coloured waistcoat with gilt buttons, an open frock-coat
of blue cloth with velvet lapels. Around his neck was a satin stock,
in which were three pins, connected by small chains. His shirt collar
was divided behind, and rose in two sharp points under his chin, which
obliged him to keep his head erect in a quite military posture. Such
was Captain Keeling, commander of the famous old Indiaman _Countess
Ida_.

I guessed he would not remain long below, otherwise I should have been
tempted to join him in a glass of grog, spite of the company of Colonel
Bannister, who was hardly the sort of man to make one feel happy on
such an occasion as the first night out at sea with memory bitterly
recent of leave-taking, of kisses, of the hand-shakes of folks one
might never see again.




CHAPTER II

THE FRENCH LUGGER


My pipe was out; the quarter-deck bulwarks hid the sea, and so I
mounted the poop ladder to take a look round before turning in. Away
to port, or _larboard_, as we then called it, was a full-rigged ship
rolling up Channel under all plain sail, with such a smother of white
yeast clouding her bows, and racing aft into the long line of her
wake, which went glaring over the dark throbbing waters, that it made
one think of the base of a waterspout writhing upwards to meet the
descending tube of vapour. She was the first object that took my eye,
and I hurriedly crossed the deck to view her. Mr. Prance, the chief
mate, stood at the rail watching her.

‘A noble sight!’ said I.

‘Yes, sir, an English frigate. A fifty-one gun vessel, apparently.
Upon my word, nothing statelier ever swam, or ever again will swim,
than ships of that kind. Look at the line of her batteries--black and
white like the keys of a pianoforte! What squareness of yard, sir! Her
main-royal should be as big as our topgallant-sail.’

He sent a look aloft at the reeling, fabric over our heads, with a
thoughtful drag, at a short growth of beard that curled upwards from
his chin like the fore-thatch of a sou’-wester. The noble ship went
floating out into the darkness astern, and her pale heights died upon
the gloom like a burst of steam dissolving in the wind.

‘What is that out yonder upon the starboard bow there, Mr. Prance?’
said I.

He peered awhile, and said: ‘Some craft reaching like
ourselves--standing as we head--a lumpish thing, anyhow. What a blot
she makes, seeing that she has no height of spar!’

‘We are overhauling her,’ said I.

‘Ay,’ he answered, keeping his eyes fixed upon her. ‘Doesn’t she seem a
bit uncertain, though?’ he muttered, as if thinking aloud.

I had wonderfully good sight in those days, and after straining my eyes
awhile against the heap of scarce determinable shadow which the craft
made, I exclaimed: ‘She’ll be a French lugger, or I’m greatly mistaken.’

‘I believe you are right, sir,’ answered the mate.

He drew a little away from me, as a hint, perhaps, that he desired to
address his attention to the vessel on the bow, and suddenly putting
his hand to his mouth, he hailed the forecastle in a sharp clear note.
An answer was returned swift as the tone of a bell to the blow of its
tongue.

‘Show a light forward! Smartly now! That chap ahead seems asleep.’

There were no side-lights in those days. Some long years were to elapse
before the Shipping Act enforced the use of a night signal more to the
point than a short flourish of the binnacle lamp over the side. In a
few moments a large globular lantern in the grip of a seaman, whose
figure showed like a sketch in phosphorus to the illumination of the
flame, was rested upon the forecastle rail, with the night beyond him
looking the blacker for the rising and falling point of fire. The hint
seemed to be taken by the fellow ahead, and the mate walked aft to the
binnacle, into which he stood looking, afterwards going to the rail, at
which he lingered, staring forwards.

I crossed over to leeward to watch the milk-like race of waters along
the side. The foam made a sort of twilight of its own in the air. Under
the foot of the mainsail that was arched transversely across the deck,
the wind stormed with a note of hurricane out of the huge concavity of
the cloths, and made the rushing snow giddy with the whipping of it,
till the eye reeled again to the sight of the yeasty boiling. Never
did any ship raise such a smother about her as the _Countess Ida_. Our
speed was scarce a full five miles, and yet, looking over to leeward,
when the huge fabric came heeling down to her channels to the scud
of a sea and to the weight of the wind in her canvas, you would have
supposed her thundering through it a whole ten knots at least.

On a sudden there was a loud and fearful cry forward. ‘Port your
hellum! port your hellum!’ I could hear a voice roaring out with a
meaning as of life or death in the startling vehemence of the utterance.

‘Starboard! starboard!’ shouted Mr. Prance, who was still standing
aft: ‘over with it, men, for God’s sake, before we’re into her!’

Next instant there was a dull shock throughout the ship; a thrill
that ran through her planks into the very soles of one’s feet, while
there arose shrieks and shouts as from three-score throats under the
bows, and a most lamentable and terrifying noise of wood-splintering,
of canvas tearing, of liberated sails flogging the wind. I bounded
to the weather-rail, and saw a large hull of some eighty tons wholly
dismasted--a wild scene of wreck and ruin to the flash of the moon at
that moment shining down out of a clear space of sky--gliding past into
our wake. The dark object seemed filled with men, and the yells left me
in no doubt that she was a Frenchman--a large three-masted lugger, as I
had supposed her.

In an instant our ship was in an uproar. There is nothing in language
to express the noise and excitement. To begin with, our helm having
been put down, we had come round into the wind, and lay pitching
heavily with sails slatting and thundering, yards creaking, rigging
straining. The sailors rushed to and fro. All discipline for the
moment seemed to have gone overboard. The captain had come tumbling up
on deck, and was calling orders to the mate, who re-echoed them in loud
bawlings to the quarter-deck and forecastle. Lanterns were got up and
shown over the rail, and by the light of them you saw the figures of
the seamen speeding from rope to rope and hauling upon the gear, their
gruff, harsh chorusings rising high above the terrified chatter of the
passengers--many of whom had rushed up on deck barely clothed--high
also above the storming and shrilling of the wind, the deep notes of
angry waters warring at our bows, and the distracting shaking and
beating of the sails.

But a few orders delivered by Mr. Prance, whose tongue was as a trumpet
in a moment like this, acted upon the ship as the sympathetic hand of a
horseman upon a restive terrified thoroughbred.

‘Haul up the mainsail--fore clew garnets--back maintopsail yard--tail
on to the weather-braces and round in handsomely. Mr. Cocker (this was
addressed to the second-mate, who had tumbled up with the rest of the
watch below on feeling the thump the _Countess Ida_ had given herself,
and on hearing the uproar that followed)--burn a flare--smartly, if you
please! Also get blue lights and rockets up.’

I ran aft to see if the vessel that we had wrecked was anywhere about.
The moon was shining brilliantly down upon the sea at that time, and
the swollen Channel waters were lifting their black heights into
creaming peaks in an atmosphere of delicate silver haze, that yet
suffered the eye to penetrate to the dark confines of the horizon. The
wake of the planet was a long throbbing line of angry broken splendour
in the south; but the tail of it seemed to stream fair to the point of
sea into which the lugger had veered, and I was confident that if she
were afloat I should see her.

‘Who is that to leeward there?’ called the captain from the other side
of the wheel in a tone of worry and irritation.

‘Mr. Dugdale,’ I replied.

‘Oh, beg pardon, I’m sure,’ he exclaimed; ‘do you see anything of the
vessel that we’ve run down?’

‘Nothing,’ I responded.

‘She must have foundered,’ said he; ‘yet though I listened, I heard no
cries after the wreck had once fairly settled away from us.’

Here the mate came aft hastily, and with a touch of his cap, reported
that the well had been sounded, and that all was right with the ship.

‘Very well, sir,’ said the captain. ‘I shall keep all fast with my
boats. The calamity can’t be helped. I’m not going to increase it by
sacrificing my men’s lives. The poor devils will have had a boat of
their own, I suppose. Show blue lights, will ye, Mr. Prance, and send a
rocket up from time to time.’

They were burning a flare over the quarter-deck rail at that
moment--some turpentine arrangement, that threw out a long flickering
flame and a great coil of smoke from the yawning mouth of the tin
funnel that contained the mixture. It was like watching the ship by
sheet-lightning to see a large part of her amidships and her mainmast
and the pale lights of the mainsail hanging from the yard in the grip
of the gear--to see all this come and go as the flame leapt and faded.
There was a crowd of terrified passengers on the poop, some of them
ladies, hugging themselves in dressing-gowns and shawls; and out of the
heart of the little mob rose the saw-like notes of Colonel Bannister.

‘These collisions,’ I heard him cry, ‘never _can_ take place if a
proper look-out be kept. It is preposterous to argue. I’d compel
the oldest seaman who contradicted me to eat his words. Why, have I
been making the voyage to India four times----’ But the rest of his
observations were drowned in cries of astonishment and alarm from the
ladies as a rocket, discharged close to them, went hissing and shearing
up athwart the howling wind in a stream of fire, breaking on high into
a blood-red ball, that floated swiftly landwards, like an electric
meteor, ghastly against the moonshine, with a wide crimson atmosphere
about it that tinctured the very scud. A moment after a blue light was
burnt over the side from the head of the poop ladder, whereat there
was a general recoil and more shrill exclamations from the ladies. In
fact, these wild mystical lights as it were coming on top of the fancy
of men drowning astern, and colouring the ship with unearthly glares,
and flinging a wonderful complexion of horror upon the night for a
wide space round about the pitching and groaning Indiaman, put such
an element of mystery and fear into the scene that though I was by no
means a new hand at such sea-shows, I will own to shuddering again and
yet again as I overhung the side of the poop, striving to discern any
object that might resemble a boat in the foam-whitened gloom into which
the lugger had slided.

‘What has happened? Everybody is so excited that one can’t get at the
real story.’

I turned quickly, and saw the tall figure of a lady at my side. She was
habited in a cloak, the hood of which was over her head, and darkened
her face almost to the concealment of it, saving her eyes, which shone
large, liquid, with a clear red spot in the depths, from the reflection
of the flare at the quarter-deck bulwark.

I briefly explained, lifting my cap as I gave her her name--Miss
Temple--for I had particularly remarked her as she came aboard at
Gravesend, and asked who she was, though I had seen nothing more of her
down to that moment. I ended my account pointing to the quarter of the
sea where the lugger had disappeared.

‘Thanks for the story,’ she exclaimed, with a sudden note of
haughtiness in her voice, while she kept her eyes, of the rich
blackness of the tropic night-sky, fixed firm and gleaming upon me,
as though she had addressed me in error, and wanted to make sure of
me. She moved as though she would walk off, paused, and said: ‘Poor
creatures! I hope they will be saved. Is our ship injured, do you know?’

‘I believe not,’ said I a little coldly. ‘There may be a rope or two
broken forward perhaps, but there is nothing but the French lugger to
be sorry for.’

‘My aunt, Mrs. Radcliffe,’ said she, ‘has been rendered somewhat
hysterical by the commotion on deck. She is too ill to leave her bed. I
think I may reassure her?’

‘Oh yes,’ I exclaimed. ‘But yonder, abreast of the wheel there, is the
captain to confirm my words.’

She gave me a bow, or rather a curtsey of those days, and walked aft
to address the captain, as I supposed. Instead, she descended the
companion hatch, and I lost sight of her.

A disdainful lady, thought I, but a rare beauty too!--marvellous eyes,
anyhow, to behold by such an illumination as this of rockets and blue
lights, and flying moonshine, and the yellow glimmer of flare-tins.

All this while the ship lay hove-to, her maintopsail to the mast, the
folds of her hanging mainsail sending a low thunder into the wind
as it shook its cloths, the seas breaking in stormy noises from her
bow; but _now_ there fell a dead silence upon the people along her
decks: nothing broke this hush upon the life of the vessel, save the
occasional harsh hissing rush of a rocket piercing the restless noises
of the sea and the whistling of the wind in the rigging. The bulwark
rail was lined with sailors, eagerly looking towards the tail of the
misty wake of the moon, into which the black surges went shouldering
and changing into troubled hills of dull silver. The captain and two
of the mates stood aft, intently watching the water, often putting
themselves into strained hearkening postures, their hands to their
ears. Most of the lady passengers went below, but not to bed, for you
could catch a sight of them through the skylight seated at the table
talking swiftly, often directing anxious glances at the window-glass
through which you could see them. There was one majestic old lady
amongst them with grey hair that looked to be powdered, a hawk’s-bill
nose, an immense bosom, that started immediately from under her
chin. The lamplight flashed in diamonds in her ears, and in rubies
and in stones of value and beauty upon her fingers. She was Colonel
Bannister’s wife, and was apparently not wanting in her husband’s fiery
energy and capacity of taking peppery views of things, if I might judge
by her vehement nods, and the glances she shot around her from her grey
eyes. It was a cabin picture I caught but a glimpse of as I crossed the
deck to take a look to leeward, but one, somehow, that sunk into my
memory, maybe because of the magic-lantern-like look of the interior,
with its brilliant lamps and many-coloured attire of the ladies in
their shawls, dressing-gowns, and what not--standing out upon the eye
amidst the wild dark frame of the seething clamorous night.

All at once there was a loud cry. I rushed back to the weather rail.

‘There’s a boat heading for us, sir--see her, sir? Away yonder, this
side o’ the tumble of the moon’s reflection!’

‘Ay, there she is! It’ll be the lugger’s boat. God, how she dives!’

Twenty shadowy arms pointed in the direction which had been indicated
by the gruff grumbling cries of the sailors. The second mate, Mr.
Cocker, came hastily forward to the break of the poop.

‘Stand by, some of you,’ he shouted, ‘to heave them the end of a line.
Make ready with bowlines to help them over the side.’

I could see the boat clearly now as she rose to the height of a sea,
her black wet side sparkling out an instant to the moonlight ere she
sank out of sight past the ivory white head of the surge sweeping under
her. She seemed to be deep with men; but I could count only two oars.
She was rushed down upon us by the impulse of the sea and wind, and I
felt my heart stand still as she drove bow on into us, whirling round
alongside in a manner to make you look for the wreck of her in staves
washing away under our counter. She was full of people, with women
amongst them--poor creatures, in great white caps and long golden
earrings, the men for the most part in huge fishermen’s boots, and
tasselled caps and jerseys that might have been of any colour in that
light. One could just make these features out, but no more, for the
contents of the boat as it rose soaring and falling alongside were but
a dark huddle of human shapes, writhing and twisting like a mass of
worms in a pot, vociferating to us in the scarce intelligible _patois_
of Gravelines or Calais or Boulogne.

There was no magic in the commands even of British officers to British
sailors to put the least element of calm into the business. It was
not only that at one moment the boat alongside seemed to be hove up
to the Indiaman’s covering-board and that at the next she was rushing
down into a chasm that laid bare many feet of the big ship’s yellow
sheathing: there was the dreadful expectation of the whole of the human
freight being overset and drowning alongside in a breath; there were
the heart-rending shouts of the distracted people; there was the total
inability of captain and mates to make themselves understood. How it
was managed I will not pretend to explain. By some means the boat was
dragged to the gangway, grinding and thumping herself horribly against
the Indiaman’s rolling, stooping, massive side; then bowlines and
ropes in plenty were dangled over or flung into her; and through the
unshipped gangway, illuminated by half-a-dozen lanterns, and crowded by
a hustling mob of sailors and passengers, one after another, the women
and the men--most of the men coming first!--were dragged inboards,
some of them falling flat upon the deck, some dropping on their knees
and crossing themselves; a few of the women weeping passionately, one
of them sobbing in dreadful paroxysms, the others mute as statues, as
though terror and the presence of death had frozen the lifeblood in
them and arrested the very beating of their hearts. Two of them fell
into the sea; but they had lines about them and were dragged up half
dead. They were all of them dripping wet, the men’s sea-boots full of
water; whilst the soaked gowns of the women flooded the deck on which
they stood, as though several buckets of brine had been capsized there.

Old Keeling’s pity for them would not go to the length of introducing
the wretched creatures into the cuddy, to spoil the ship’s fine
carpets and stain and ruin the coverings of the couches. They were
accordingly brought together in the recess under the break of the poop,
where at all events they were sheltered. Hot spirits and water were
given to them along with bread and meat, and this supper the unhappy
creatures ate by the light of the dimly burning lanterns held by the
sailors.

There never was an odder wilder sight than the picture the poor
half-drowned creatures made. Some of the women scarcely once
intermitted their sobs and lamentations, save when they silenced their
throats by a mouthful of food or drink. They were very ugly, dark as
coffee; and their black wet hair streaming like sea-weed upon their
shoulders and brows from under their soaked caps made them look like
witches. The men talked hoarsely and eagerly with many passionate
gestures, which suggested fierce denunciation. The mate coming down
to the booby hatch around which these people were squatting, eating,
drinking, moaning, and jabbering without the least regard to the crowd
of curious eyes which inspected them from the quarter-deck--the mate,
I say, coming down, stood looking a minute at them, and then sent a
glance round, and seeing me, asked if I spoke French.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but not such French as those people are talking.’

‘We have three passengers,’ said he, ‘who, I am told, are scholars in
that language; but the steward informs me they’re too sea-sick to come
on deck. Just ask these people in such French as you have, if their
captain’s amongst them.’

As he said this, a little old man seated on the hatch-coaming, with a
red nightcap on, immense earrings, and a face of leather puckered into
a thousand wrinkles like the grin of a monkey, looked up at Mr. Prance,
and nodding with frightful energy whilst he struck his bosom with his
clenched fist, cried out: ‘Yash, yash, me capitaine.’

‘Ha!’ said the mate, ‘do you speak English, then?’

‘Yash, yash,’ he roared: ‘me speakee Angleesh.’

Happily he knew enough to save me the labour of interpreting; and
_labour_ it would have been with a vengeance, since, though it was
perfectly certain none amongst them, saving the little monkey-faced
man, comprehended a syllable of the mate’s questions, every time
the small withered chap answered--which he did with extraordinary
convulsions and a vast variety of frantic gesticulations--all the rest
of them broke into speech, the women joining in, and there was such
a hubbub of tongues that not an inch of idea could I have got out of
the distracting row. However, in course of time the leathery manikin
who called himself captain made Mr. Prance understand that the lugger
belonged to Boulogne; that she had the survivors of another lugger on
board, making some thirty-four souls in all, men and women, at the time
of the collision, of which seventeen or eighteen were drowned. After he
had given Mr. Prance these figures, he turned to the others and said
something in a shrill, fierce, rapid voice, whereat the women fell to
shrieking and weeping, whilst many of the men tore their hair, some
going the length of knocking their heads against the cuddy front. It
was a sight to sicken the heart, the more, I think, for the unutterable
element of grotesque farce imported into that dismal tragedy by their
countenances, postures, and behaviour; and having heard and seen
enough, I slipped away on to the poop, with a chill coming into my
very soul to the thought of the drowned bodies out yonder when my eye
went to the sea weltering black to the troubled line of moonshine, and
heaving in ashen luminous billows in that chill path of light.

But long before this, our rockets, blue-lights, and flares had been
seen; and a moment or two after I had gained the poop I spied the
figure of Captain Keeling with a few male passengers at his side
standing at the rail watching a powerful cutter thrashing through it
to us close-hauled, with the water boiling to her leaps, and her big
mainsail to midway high dark with the saturation of the flying brine.
In less than twenty minutes she was rising and falling buoyant as a
seabird abreast of us, with a shadowy figure at her lee rail bawling
with lungs of brass to know what was wrong.

‘I have run down a French lugger,’ shouted Captain Keeling, ‘and have
half her people on board, and must put them ashore at once, for I wish
to proceed.’

‘Right y’are,’ came from the cutter; but with a note of irritation and
disappointment in the cry, as I could not but fancy.

Then followed some wonderful manœuvring. There was only one way of
transshipping the miserable French people, and that was by a yard-arm
whip and a big basket. Hands sprang aloft to prepare the necessary
tackle; Prance meanwhile, from the head of the poop ladder, thundered
the intentions of the Indiaman through a speaking-trumpet to the
cutter. I could see old Keeling stamp from time to time with impatience
as he broke away from the questions of the passengers, one of whom was
Colonel Bannister, into a sharp walk full of grief and irritability.
Meanwhile they had shifted their helm aboard the cutter and got way
upon the fine little craft. I saw her take the weight of the wind
and heel down to the line of her gunwale, then break a dark sea into
boiling milk, leaping the liquid acclivity, as a horse takes a tall
gate, burying herself nose under with the downwards launching rush,
then soaring again to the height of the next billow with full way upon
her. She came tearing and hissing through it as though her coppered
forefoot were of red-hot metal, and when abreast of our lee quarter,
put her helm down, and swept with marvellous grace and precision to
alongside of us, clear of our shearing spars, and there she lay.

It was hard upon midnight when the last basket-load had been lowered
on to her deck. There was no hitch; all went well; a line attached to
the basket enabled the cutter’s people to haul it fair to their decks;
but the terror of the unfortunate Frenchmen was painful to see. The
women got into the basket bravely; but many of the men blankly refused
to enter, and had to be stowed in it by force, our Jacks holding on
till the order to ‘sway away’ was given, when up would go poor Crapaud
shrieking vengeance upon us all, and calling upon the Virgin and saints
for help. In its way it was like a little engagement with an enemy.
Some of the Frenchmen drew knives, and had to be knocked down.

Then, when the last of them was swayed over the side and lowered--‘Are
you all right?’ shouted Captain Keeling to the cutter.

‘All right,’ responded a deep voice, hoarse with rum and weather. ‘I
suppose your owners’ll make the job worth something to us?’

‘Ay, ay,’ answered the captain. ‘Round with your topsail yard, Mr.
Prance. Lively now! this business has cost us half a night as it is.’

In a few minutes the great yards on the main were swung slowly to the
drag of the braces with loud heave-yeos from the sailors, and the ship,
feeling the weight of the wind in the vast dim hollow of the topsail,
leaned with a new impulse of life in her frame and drove half an acre
of foam ahead of her. We had resumed our voyage; and with a sense of
supreme weariness in me following the excitement of the hours, and
chilled to the marrow by my long spell on deck and incessant loiterings
in the keen night-wind, I entered the saloon, called for a tumbler of
grog, and made my way to my berth.




CHAPTER III

MY FELLOW PASSENGERS


It blew a hard breeze of wind that night. Soon after I had left
the deck they furled the mainsail and topgallant-sail, reefed the
maintopsail, and tied another reef in the mizzen-topsail. In fact, it
looked as if we were to have a black gale of wind, dead on end too,
with a sure prospect then of bearing up for the Downs afresh. How it
may be in these steamboat times, I will not pretend to say; but my
experience of the old sailing-ship is that the first night out, let the
weather be what it will, is, on the whole, about as wretched a time as
a man at any period of his life has to pass through.

Mr. Colledge was sound asleep in his bunk, his brandy flask within
convenient reach of his hand. It was certain enough that he had heard
nothing of the disturbance on deck. I undressed and rolled into my
bed, and there lay wide awake for a long time. The ship creaked like
a cradle. The full dismalness of a first night out was upon me, and it
was made weightier yet--how much weightier indeed!--by the recollection
of the wild and sudden tragedy of the evening. Oh, the insufferable
weariness of the noises, the straining of the bulkheads, the yearning
roar of the dark surge washing the porthole, with the boiling of it
dying out into a dim simmering upon the wind, the instant stagger of
the ship to the blow of some heavy sea full on her bow, the sensation
of breathless descent as the vessel chopped down with a huge heave to
windward into the trough, the pendulum swing of one’s wearing apparel
hanging against the bulkhead, the half-stifled exclamations breaking
from adjacent cabins, the whole improved into a true oceanic flavour
by the occasional hoarse songs of the sailors above, faintly heard, as
though you were in a vault, and that strange vibratory humming which
the wind makes to one hearkening to it out of the cabin of a ship.

I fell asleep at last, and was awakened at half-past seven by the
steward, who wished to know if I wanted hot water to shave with. The
moment I had my consciousness, I was sensible that a heavy sea was
running.

‘No shaving this morning, thank you,’ said I, ‘unless I have a mind to
slice the nose off my face. How’s the weather, steward?’

‘Blowing a buster from the south’ard, sir,’ he answered, talking with
his lips at the venetian of the closed door, ‘and the ship going along
’andsomely as a roll of smoke.’

Here somebody called him, and he trotted away.

Mr. Colledge awoke. ‘By George!’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ve had a doocid long
sleep.’

‘How d’ye feel?’ said I.

‘In no humour to rise,’ he answered. ‘I suppose I can have what
breakfast I’m likely to eat brought to me here?’

‘Bless you, yes,’ I answered.

‘Any news, Mr. Dugdale?’ he asked, his voice beginning to languish as
a sensation of nausea grew upon him with the larger awakening of his
faculties.

‘We ran down a French lugger last night,’ said I, ‘and drowned a lot of
men. That’s all.’

He eyed me dully, thinking perhaps that I was joking, and then said:
‘Well, there it is, you see. Yesterday, you were talking of the fun of
a voyage; and the very earliest of the humours is the drowning of a lot
of men.’

‘And women,’ said I.

‘Poor devils!’ he exclaimed. ‘Will you hand me a bottle of Hungary
water that you’ll find in my portmanteau? Much obliged to you, Dugdale:
and will you kindly tell the steward as you pass through the cabin to
bring me a cup of tea?’

‘Get up by-and-by, if you feel equal to it,’ said I. ‘Nursing
sea-sickness only makes the demon more pitiless. Show yourself on
deck, and the wind’ll blow the nausea out of you. And I’ll tell you a
better cure than Hungary water or brandy flasks--a cube of salt-horse,
Colledge; a hearty lump of marine beef, something to work up the
muscles of your jaws, and to sharpen your teeth for you.’

‘Oh gracious, my dear fellow--don’t,’ he exclaimed, turning his face to
the wall of the ship; and I heard him exclaim, as though muttering to
himself: ‘How the water gurgles about this window, and what a doocid
sickly green it is!’

But a very few of us assembled at the breakfast table. Colonel
Bannister was there, a very ramrod of a man, with a Bengal-tigerish
expression of face as he glared round about him from betwixt his white
wire-like whiskers. There were also present Mr. Emmett, an artist,
who was making the voyage to the East for the purpose of painting
Indian scenery, a man with long hair curling down his back, a ragged
beard and moustaches, a velvet coat, and Byronic collars, out of
which his long thin neck forked up like the head of a pole through a
scarecrow’s suit of clothes; Mr. Peter Hemskirk, who looked uncommonly
fat, pale, and unfinished in his attire this morning; two young Civil
Service fellows--as we should now call their trade--named Greenhew and
Fairthorne; and Mr. Sylvanus Johnson, a journalist, bound to Bombay
or Calcutta (I cannot be sure of the city), to edit a newspaper--a
bullet-headed man, with a sort of low-comedian face, very blue about
the cheeks where he shaved, and small keen restless black eyes, full
of intelligence, whose suggestion in that way was not to be impaired
or weakened by an expression in repose of singular self-complacency.
Captain Keeling, at the head of the table, sat skewered up in his
uniform frock-coat in stiff satin stock and collars. Mr. Prance
occupied the other end of the table. He, too, was attired in a uniform
resembling the dress worn by the skipper. He had a pleasant brown
sailorly face, with a floating pose of head upon his shoulders that
made one think of a soap-bubble poised on top of a pipe-stem. There
were no ladies. Once I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Colonel Bannister’s
Roman nose, and grey hair ornamented with a large black lace cap,
fitfully hovering for a moment or two in the wide hatch past the chief
officer’s chair, down which the steps led that went to the sleeping
berths. But the apparition vanished with almost startling suddenness,
as though the old lady had fallen or been violently pulled below. When,
later on, I inquired after her, I learnt that she had betaken herself
again to her bunk.

It was a mighty uncomfortable breakfast. The ship was rolling violently
and convulsively upon the short snappish Channel seas--the most
insufferable of all waters when in commotion, making even the seasoned
salt pine for the long regular rhythmic heave of the blue ocean billow.
The fiddles hindered the plates from sliding on to our laps; but their
contents were not to be so easily coaxed into keeping their place; an
unusually heavy lurch shot a large helping of liver and bacon on to
Mr. Hemskirk’s knees; and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Hemmeridge, came
perilously near to being badly scalded by Mr. Johnson, the literary
man, who, in reaching for a cup of tea tilted the swinging tray. There
was not much talk, and what little was said chiefly concerned the
incident of the previous evening.

‘Captain,’ cried young Mr. Fairthorne in an effeminate voice--he was
the gentleman, it seems, who last night had been calling upon anybody
to smother the ayah--‘whath to become of thothe poor Frenchmen?’

‘Sir,’ answered Captain Keeling in a manner as stiff as a marline-spike
with his dislike of the subject, ‘I do not know.’

‘Frenchmen,’ cried Colonel Bannister in a loud voice, as though he were
directing the manœuvres of a company of Sepoys, ‘are the hereditary
enemies of our country, and it never can matter to a Briton what
becomes of them.’

‘Boot my tear sir,’ remarked Mr. Hemskirk, ‘you are a Briton, yes--and
you are a Christian too, und der Franchman iss your broder.’

‘My what?’ roared the colonel. ‘Tell ye what it is, Mr. Hemskirk: it is
a good job that you cannot pronounce our language, otherwise you might
happen sometimes, sir, to grow offensive.’

Mynheer, who seemed to have had some previous acquaintance with this
little bombshell of a man, dried the grease upon his lips with a
napkin, and cast a wink upon Mr. Greenhew, whose face of resentment
at this familiarity caused me to break into such an immoderate fit of
laughter that there was nothing for it but to bolt from the table.

I found a real Channel picture stretching round me when I gained the
deck; a grey sky, lightened in places with a kind of suffusion of
radiance that made one think of the rusty bronze lingering in the wake
of an expired sunset. Saving these flaws of dull light, there was no
break anywhere visible in the wide cold bald stare of heaven over our
mastheads. The strong wind was a dry one, yet the horizon was thick
with a look of rain all the way round; and out of the smother in
the south, the sea was rolling in heights of a dark green, rich with
creaming foam, that somehow seemed to satisfy the eye, as though each
frothing crest were a streak of sunshine. There was a smack half a
mile to windward of us staggering along and sinking and rising under a
fragment of red mainsail; but there was nothing else to be seen in that
way.

The wind was blowing free for us--almost dead abeam, indeed; and the
_Countess Ida_ was swarming through it in a manner to put a quicker
beat into the heart at the first sight of the picture she made. The
topgallant-sail was set over the single-reefed maintopsail; the whole
foresail was on her, and, with the other topsails and a staysail or
two, was tearing the great ship through the short savage heapings
of water with a power that made one think of steam as trifling by
comparison. The forecastle was wet with flying spray. The galley
chimney was smoking cheerily, and from all about the long-boat came
hearty farmyard sounds of the grunting of pigs and the bleating of
sheep and the cackling of hens. There was a gang of seamen at the
pumps, and as they plied the brakes with nervous sinewy arms, their
song chimed in with the gushing of the water flowing freely to the
scuppers, and washing back again to their feet with every roll to
windward. Other seamen were at work upon the carronades, or cleaning
paint-work with scrubbing-brushes, or coiling gear away upon pins,
and so on, and so on. It was after eight, and all hands were on deck,
and a fine set of livelies they looked, spite of most of them being
snugged up in black or yellow oil-skins. Ships went with full companies
in those days, and but for the slenderness of our ordnance, it might
have been easy to imagine one’s self on board a man-of-war when one ran
one’s eyes over the decks of the _Countess Ida_ and counted the crew,
and marked the butcher and butcher’s mates, the cook and _his_ mates,
the baker and _his_ mates, the carpenter and _his_ mates, coming and
going, and making a very fair of the neighbourhood of the galley.

The second mate warmly clad paced the weather side of the poop, sending
many a weatherly glance to seaward, with a frequent lifting of his
eyes to the rounded iron-hard canvas; whilst against the brilliant
white wake of the ship, roaring and boiling upwards as it seemed, to
the stoop of the Indiaman’s huge square counter, the figures of the
two sailors at the big wheel stood out clear-cut as cameos, with the
broad brass band upon the circle dully reflecting a space of copperish
light in the sky over the weather mizzen-topsail yard-arm, and the
newly polished hood of the binnacle gleaming as though sun-touched.
A couple of midshipmen in pea-coats and brass buttons, curly headed
young rogues, with a spirit of mischief bright in every glance they
sent, patrolled the lee side of the poop; and up in the mizzen top
were two more of them, with yet another long-legged fellow jockeying a
spur of the cross-trees, with his loose trousers rattling like a flag;
but what job he was upon I could not tell. The planks of this deck
were as white as the trunk of a tree newly stripped of its bark. Four
handsome quarter-boats swung at the davits. Along the rail on either
hand went a row of hencoops, through the bars of which the heads of
cocks and hens came and went in a winking sort of way, like a swift
showing and withdrawing of red rags. On the rail, for a considerable
distance, were stowed bundles of compressed hay, the scent of which
was a real puzzle to the nose, coming as it did through the hard sweep
of the salt wind. The white skylights glistened through the intricacies
of brass wire which shielded them. Abaft the wheel, on either side of
it, their tompioned muzzles eyed blindly by the closed ports meant to
receive them, were a couple of eighteen pounders; for in those days the
Indiamen still went armed; not heavily, indeed, as in the war-times of
an earlier period, but with artillery and small-arms enough to enable
her to dispute with some promise of success with the picaroon who was
still afloat, whose malignant flag the burnished waters of the Antilles
yet reflected, and whose amiable company of assassins were as often
to be met with under the African and South American heights as in the
Channel of the Mozambique, or eastward yet on the broad surface of the
Indian Ocean.

I crossed the deck to where Mr. Cocker was stumping, and asked him if
he could tell me off what part of the English coast our ship now was.

‘Drawing on to the Wight, sir,’ he answered, with a sort of groping
look in the little moist blue eyes he turned over the lee bow into the
thickness beyond.

‘Well, we’re blowing through it, anyway,’ said I. ‘I shouldn’t have
allowed these heels for any conceivable structure born with such bows
as the _Countess Ida_. What is it?’ I asked with a glance at the broad
dazzle of yeast dancing and whipping and slinging off the Indiaman’s
tall side against the hurl of the weather surge.

‘It’ll be all eight,’ answered the second officer: ‘it would be ten had
she worked herself loose of the grip of the stevedores. She wants the
mainsail and foreto’garn’sail. These old buckets are manufactured to
creak, and whilst they creak, they hold, it is said.’

His face crumpled up into a grin that made him look twenty years older
under the thatch of his sou’-wester curling to his eyebrows, with the
broad flaps over his ears like a nightcap for his sea-helmet to sit
upon.

‘Pray, Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘was any damage done to the ship by the
collision last night?’

‘There wasn’t so much as a rope-yarn parted,’ he answered. ‘I looked
to see the spritsail yard sprung, for it’ll have been that spar, I
reckon, which dragged the lugger’s masts overboard by the shrouds of
them. But it’s as sound as anything else aboard the ship.’

He shifted uneasily, as though to make off, and, turning my head, I
spied the captain looking into the binnacle. So, having had already
enough of the deck, I stepped below for a smoke in the cuddy recess,
where I found Mr. Emmett in a long cloak, such as mysterious assassins
and renegade noblemen used to wear at the Coburg Theatre, sucking at a
large curled meerschaum pipe, and arguing on the subject of longitude
with a little man almost a dwarf, an honest and highly intelligent
pigmy, with the head of a giant supported on the legs of a boy of
six, an amiable earnest little creature, with a trick of looking
up wistfully into your face. His name was Richard Saunders: and I
afterwards understood that he was proceeding to India on behalf of some
Pharmaceutical Society, to collect information on and examples of Hindu
and other medicines, drugs, charms, and so forth.

Well, all that day it continued to blow a very strong wind. The ship’s
plunging increased as the Channel opened under her bow and admitted
something of the weight of the Atlantic in the run of its seas. There
was a constant sharp-shooting of spray forward over the forecastle, and
the wet came sobbing along; the lee scuppers to where the cuddy front
checked it under the poop ladder. Very few of us assembled at lunch or
at dinner.

During the progress of this last meal, Colonel Bannister left the table
and went below, and after an interval, uprose through the hatch, with
his large distinguished-looking wife holding on to him. Mynheer Peter
Hemskirk, on seeing her, cried out: ‘Ah, Meestrees Bannister, boot dot
iss vot I call plooky!’ and Mr. Johnson came near to breaking his neck
whilst starting to his legs to stand as she passed. She took a chair
next her husband, and sat grimly staring around her, her lips pale with
the compression of them. She shook her head to every suggestion made by
the steward, and then, being unable to hold out any longer, seized hold
of her little ramrod of a husband and went staggering and rolling below
with him. When he returned, he tossed down a glass of wine with an
angry gesture and a fierce countenance, and looking at Hemskirk, cried
out: ‘I’ve a great respect for my wife, sir, and she’s a fine woman in
every sense of the word.’--The Dutchman nodded.--‘But,’ continued the
colonel, clenching his fist, ‘if ever I go to sea with a woman again,
be she wife, aunt, or grandmother, may I be poisoned for a lunatic, and
my remains committed to the deep. This is the fourth time I’ve sworn
it--my mind is now resolved!’

Out of all this sort of thing one could get a laugh here and there; but
on the whole it was desperately weary work, and continued so till we
had blown clear of soundings. Altogether, it was as ugly a down Channel
run as any man would pray to be preserved from; the atmosphere grey,
the seas a muddy green, the howling blast chill as a November morn,
often darkening to a squall, that would sweep between the masts in
horizontal lines of rain sparkling like steel, and with spite enough in
the lancing of them to compel the strongest to turn his back. Now and
again a lady passenger would show in the cuddy; but though there were
some twenty-eight of us in all, not reckoning a couple of ayahs, and
a Chinaman in the garb of his country, who acted as nurse to one Mrs.
Trevor’s baby, never once in those days did above seven of us, barring
the skipper and his mates, sit down to a meal.

The thick weather lay heavily upon the captain’s mind, held him in fits
of abstraction whilst at table, dismissed him after a brief sitting
to the deck, and kept him heedful and taciturn whilst there. He had
had one collision, and wanted no more; and you would notice how that
tragedy had served him, by observing him when in the cuddy to prick up
his ears to the least unusual noise on deck, to glance at the tell-tale
compass over his head, as though it were the sun which he had been
patiently waiting for a chance to ‘shoot,’ to swallow his food with
impatient motions to the steward to bear a hand, and to bolt up the
cabin steps without a smile or syllable of apology to us for quitting
the table.




CHAPTER IV

LOUISE TEMPLE


But there came a change at last. Ushant was then many long leagues
astern, and the night had been dark but quiet, with a long Biscayan
swell brimming to our starboard quarter, and a play of sheet-lightning
off the lee bow, and wind enough to send the Indiaman through it at
some six knots with her royals and cross-jack furled and the weather
clew of her mainsail up. This was as the picture showed when I went
to bed at five bells--half-past ten--and on opening my eyes next
morning I found the berth brilliant with sunshine, bulkhead and ceiling
trembling to the glory rippling off the sea through the large round
scuttle or porthole, and the action of the ship a stately gliding, with
a slow long floating heave that raised no sound whatever of creak or
straining, and that, after the long spell of tumblefication, was as
grateful to every sense and to all wearied bones as the firm unrocking
surface of dry land.

Mr. Colledge was shaving himself. I lay eyeing him for a few minutes,
admiring the handsome high-born looks of the youth, and thinking it was
a pity that such manly beauty as his should lack the consecrating touch
of an intellectual expression to parallel his physical graces. He saw
me in the glass in which he was scraping himself.

‘Good-morning, Dugdale. I feel all right again, d’ye know. I am going
to eat my breakfast in the cuddy and then go on deck.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ said I, putting my legs over the side of the bunk.

‘I suppose there’ll be some girls about this morning,’ said he. ‘Who
the dooce are the passengers, I wonder? Anybody very nice aboard, not
counting that ripping young lady with the black eyes?’

‘Nearly everybody’s been as sea-sick as you,’ said I; ‘and the few
who have put in an appearance are males--your friend Emmett, the fat
Dutchman, and two or three others.’

‘Oh, you mean Mynheer Hemskirk, the corpulent chap, whose voice sounds
like that of a man inside a rum puncheon talking through the bunghole.’

I asked him if he could tell me anything about Miss Temple, the
black-eyed lady.

‘Some one told me at Gravesend,’ he answered--‘but I don’t know who it
was--that she’s a daughter of Sir Conyers Temple. I think I’ve heard
my father speak of him as a man he has hunted with. If he’s that Sir
Conyers, he broke his neck four years ago in a steeplechase.’

‘Who accompanies the young lady to India, I wonder?’ said I.

‘Her aunt, I believe; but I don’t know her name. But I say, though,
what makes you so inquisitive?’

‘Oh, my dear Colledge,’ said I, ‘one is always inquisitive about one’s
fellow-passengers on board ship. The girl came up to me on deck the
other night when the row of the collision was in full swing. I see her
big eyes now--black as ebony, yet luminous too, with the flame of a
flare-tin at the side reflected in each magnificent orb in a spot of
crimson which made her pale hooded face as mystical as a vision of the
night.’

He turned to stare at me, and broke into a laugh. ‘So! _you_ are the
poet amongst the passengers, eh? as Emmett’s the painter? What’s to be
_my_ walk? Oh, there goes the first breakfast bell! Heaven bless us,
what a delightful thing it is not to feel sea-sick!’

We continued to gabble a bit in this fashion; he then left the berth,
and a little later I followed him.

The large cuddy wore an aspect it had not before exhibited. The
sunshine sparkled upon the skylights, and the interior was full of
the blue and silver radiance of the rich and welcome autumn morning
outside. The long table was all aglow with the silver and crystal
furniture of the white damask, and through the glazed domes in the
upper deck you could see the canvas on the mizzen swelling in a milky
softness from yard to yard as the sails mounted to the height of the
tender little royal.

The passengers came from the deck or up from below one after another;
the change in the weather had acted as a charm, and here now was the
whole mob of us, one old lady excepted, with a glimpse to be had of
the two ayahs sunning themselves on the quarter-deck. The skipper,
looking a bit stale, as with too much of all-night work, but smart
enough in the gingerbread trickery of his uniform, made a little speech
of compliments to the ladies and gentlemen from the head of the table.
There was a courtliness about the old fellow that gained not a little
in relish from a sort of deep-sea flavour in his manner and varying
expressions of face. I liked the quality of the bow with which he
accompanied his answer to any lady who addressed him.

I sat at the bottom of the table on the right hand of the
chief-officer, and was able to command a pretty good view of the
people that I was to be associated with, as I might suppose, for the
next three or four, and perhaps five months. There were several girls
amongst us--two Miss Joliffes, three Miss Brookes’s, Miss Hudson, and
four or five more. Miss Hudson was exceedingly pretty--hair of dark
gold, and a skin delicate as a lily, upon which lay a kind of golden
tinge--oh, call it not freckles! though I daresay the charming effect
was produced by something of that sort. Her eyes were large, moist,
violet in hue, with slightly lifted eyebrows, which gave them an arch
look. Mr. Sylvanus Johnson, who sat next me, after staring at her
a little, muttered in my ear in a dramatic undertone: ‘Perdita has
expressed that girl, sir:

                            Violets dim,
  But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
  Or Cytherea’s breath.’

‘If that be her mother next to her,’ said I, ‘fix your attention upon
her, Mr. Johnson, and Perdita’s fancy will exhale!’

And indeed Mrs. Hudson was a very extraordinary, and I may say violent
contrast to her daughter: a pursy lady of about fifty, with a heavy
underlip, puffed-out cheeks of a bluish tint, and a wig, the youthful
hue of which defined every trace of age in her countenance, till one
thought of her as being some score years older than she really was.

But the interior was wonderfully humanised by these ladies. Their
dress, the sparkle of jewels in their ears, on their fingers and
throats, here and there a turban seated high on some motherly head--it
was the age of turbans and feathers--the soft notes of the girls
running an undertone of music through the deeper voices of the matrons
and the growling of us males grumbling conversation across and up the
table, whipped the fancy ashore, and made one think of drawing-rooms
and guitars and Books of Beauty.

There was one lady, however, who held my eye from the start. She was
Miss Louise Temple, and I cannot express how deep was the admiration
her charms excited in me. I told you that I had caught a glimpse of her
at Gravesend; but, down to this moment, I had been unable to obtain
a fair view of her. Her hair that, to judge by the coils of it, when
let down would have reached to below her knees, was of a wonderful
blackness without either gloss or deadness. She wore it in a manner
that was perfectly new in those days: in twinings which heaped it up
to the aspect of a crown; whilst behind it was brushed up in a way to
exhibit the lovely form of the head from the curve of the neck to where
the beautiful tresses lay piled. Her face was perfectly colourless,
the complexion clear, and the skin exquisitely delicate. Her mouth was
small, the upper lip slightly curved, and there was the hint of a pout
in the faint, scarce perceptible protrusion of the under lip. Her nose
was perfectly straight, like a Greek woman’s; but it had the English
indent under the brow, and therefore had the beauty, which to my fancy,
no Greek profile ever yet possessed.

But her eyes! How am I to describe them? What impression can I hope to
convey by such terms as large, black, soft, and fluid? The lids were
delicately veined, the eyelashes long, and between these fringes the
eyes shone of a dark liquid loveliness, full of the light, as it seemed
to me, of a high intelligence, with spirit and haughtiness in every
glance. They were the most dramatic, by which I do not mean theatric,
pair of twinklers that ever sparkled star-like under the beauty of a
woman’s brow; created, you might have thought, for the interpretation
of the Shakespearean imaginations, with all capacity in them of
surprise, scorn, resentment, melting tenderness, and of every fine and
noble passion. She was attired in a dress of black cloth, simple as a
riding habit of to-day, and so fitting her figure as to express without
exaggeration every point of grace in the curves and fulness of her tall
but still maidenly form.

I caught her glance for a moment: I am sure she remembered me as the
passenger she had addressed on the poop; yet there was not the faintest
expression of recognition in the full, firm, swift stare she honoured
me with. She looked away from me as haughtily as a queen, with flashing
inspection of the others of the row of us that confronted her, though
it seemed to me that her gaze lingered a little on the Honourable Mr.
Colledge, who was seated immediately opposite.

‘I reckon now,’ whispered Mr. Prance, leaning to me in his chair from
his athwart-ship post at the foot of the table, ‘that yonder Miss
Temple will be about the handsomest woman that was ever afloat.’

‘There have been many thousands of women afloat,’ said I, ‘since Noah
got under way with the ladies of his family aboard.’

‘I have been sailing in passenger-ships,’ said he,‘for nineteen years
come next month, and have never before seen such a figure-head as Miss
Temple’s. What teeth she has! Little teeth, sir, as all women’s should
be; and where’s the whiteness that’s to be compared to them?’

‘Who is that homely, pleasant-faced woman sitting by her side?’

‘Her aunt, Mrs. Radcliffe,’ he answered.

‘What errand carries that stately creature to India, do you know, Mr.
Prance?’

‘I do not, sir.’

‘Not very likely,’ I continued, ‘that she’s bound out in search of a
husband.’

‘No, no,’ he muttered. ‘The like of her have a big enough market
at home to command. No need for _her_ to cross the ocean to find a
sweetheart. She’s the daughter of a dead baronet, a tenth title, so
the captain was saying; and her mother has a large estate to live on.
Captain Keeling knows all about them. Her ladyship was seized with
paralysis when her husband was brought home with his neck broken, and
has been a sheer hulk ever since, I believe, poor thing. We brought
Mrs. Radcliffe to England last voyage. Her husband’s a big planter up
country, and worth a lac or two. I expect Miss Temple is going out on a
visit--nothing more. Her health may need a voyage. Those choice bits of
mechanism often go wrong in their works. She wants a stroke of colour
in her cheeks. ’Tis the scent of the milkmaid that she lacks, sir.’

He gave a pleasant nod, quietly rose, and went on deck by way of the
cuddy front, to relieve the second officer, who was watching the ship
for him whilst he breakfasted.

At such a first meal as this, so to speak, when, barring one, we had
all come together for the first time, there was no want of British
reserve and shyness. We chiefly contented ourselves with staring.
Colonel Bannister alone talked freely; he was loud on the subject of
army grievances, and was rendered indeed, intolerably fluent and noisy
by the respectful attention he received from a gentleman who sat over
against him, one Mr. Hodder, a tall, thin, nervous, yellow-faced man,
with a paralytic catching up of his breath in his speech, who was
going to India to fill some post of responsibility in a college. Mrs.
Bannister with her hawks-bill nose, grey hair, and full figure, sat
bolt upright, eating with avidity, and sweeping the faces round about
her with a small severe eye.

I watched little Mrs. Radcliffe with attention. It was not hard to
guess that she was an amiable, fidgety, anxious body, of elastic
properties of mind, easily, but only temporarily, to be repressed. She
talked in a quick way to her niece, darting what she had to say into
the girl’s ear, with an abrupt withdrawal of her head, and an earnest
look at Miss Temple’s face. The other would sometimes faintly smile,
but for the most part her air was one of haughty abstraction. Indeed,
it was easy to see that, so far as her opinion of her fellow-passengers
went, it was not quite flattering to the bulk of us.

It was a noble morning, indeed, on deck. There was a long blue heave
of swell from the northward, quiet as the rise and fall of a sleeper’s
breast, and the white buttons of the ship’s trucks, glancing like
silver against the moist blue of the sky, swung so slowly and tenderly
to and fro that one could almost watch them without perception of any
movement. The ocean was of a deep sea blue, all to eastward flashing
under the sun, and the small waves chased us with a voice of summer in
the caressing seething of the snow of their heads against the sides
of the Indiaman. The ship had studdingsails set, and under these far
overhanging wings the water trembled back the radiance that fell from
the swelling cloths, as though there were a floating thinness of
quicksilver there prismatic as a soap-bubble.

Very soon after breakfast the poop was filled, and I marked the Jacks
forward staring aft at the sight of us all. It was not hot enough for
an awning, and there was still too much edge in the breeze, warmly
as the sun looked down, to suffer the ladies to sit for any length
of time. The picture was a cheerful one, full of movement and life
and colour. The white-headed skipper, skewered up in his bebuttoned
and belaced frock-coat, patrolled the weather side of the deck with
Mrs. Radcliffe on his arm. Mr. Emmett paced the planks with Mrs.
Joliffe and her daughters, and I could hear him bidding them admire
the contrast between the violet shadowing in the hollows of the sails
and the delicate sheen of the edges against the blue, as though at
those extremities they dissolved into pure lustre. Little Mr. Saunders
trotted alongside the orbicular form of Mynheer Hemskirk, who showed
as a giant as he looked down into the earnest upstaring face of the
big-headed little chap. Three Civil Service youths lounged upon a
hencoop, looking askant at the young ladies, and laughing under their
breaths at what one or another of them said. Near the foremost
skylight stood Mr. Johnson and Colonel Bannister. One did not need to
listen attentively to understand that the colonel was falling foul of
the calling of journalism, and that Mr. Johnson was endeavouring to
defend it by repeating over and over again: ‘Granted--I admit it--I’m
not going to say no; but give me leave to ask, where on earth would
your profession be, sir, if its actions were not chronicled?’ These
remarks he continued to reiterate till the colonel was in a white heat,
and I had to walk away to conceal my laughter.

As I passed the companion hatchway, which you will please to understand
is the hooded entrance to the cuddy by way of the poop, Miss Temple
came up out of it, closely followed by Mr. Colledge. There was
something like a smile on her pale face, and he was talking with
animation. She wore a black hat, wide at the brim, with a large black
feather encircling it, and a sort of jacket with some rich trimming of
dark fur upon it. I was close enough to overhear them as they emerged.

‘I quite remember my dear father speaking of Lord Sandown,’ she said,
coming to a stand at the head of the companion steps, and sending
a sparkling sweeping look along the decks. ‘Is not Lady Isabella
FitzJames an aunt of yours, Mr. Colledge?’

‘Oh yes. I hope you don’t know her,’ he answered. ‘She writes books,
you know, and fancies herself a wit; and her conversation is as
parching as the seedcake she used to give me when I was a boy.’

‘I have met her,’ said Miss Temple. ‘I rather liked her. Perhaps she
neglects to be clever in the company of her own sex.’

‘Ever been to India before?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she answered in a voice whose note of affability somehow by no
means softened her haughty regard of the passengers as they walked
past. ‘I am entirely obliging my aunt by undertaking the trip. My
uncle is very old, and too infirm to make the passage to England, and
he was extremely anxious for my mother and me to spend some months with
him. Of course it was a ridiculous invitation as far as poor mamma is
concerned. You know she is a helpless cripple, Mr. Colledge.’

‘Oh, indeed. I didn’t know. I am very sorry, I’m sure,’ said he.

‘I shall not remain long,’ she continued; ‘most probably I shall return
in this ship.’

‘By George, though, I hope you will!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m booked to come
home in her too. There’ll be more shooting in three months than I shall
want, you know. I mean to pot a few tigers, and try my hand on a wild
elephant or two. By Jove, Miss Temple, if you’ll allow me, you shall
have the skin of the first tiger I shoot!’

‘Oh, you are too good, Mr. Colledge,’ said she, with a smile trembling
on her parted lips, lifting her hand as she spoke to smooth a streak
of hair off her forehead with fingers that sparkled with rings; but
her eyes were brighter than any of her gems; they turned at that
instant full upon me as I stood looking at her a little way past the
mizzen-mast, and there seemed something of positive insolence in the
brief stare she fixed upon me; the faint smile vanished to the curl of
her upper lip as she turned her head.

_That_, my fine madam, thought I, may be your manner of regarding
everything which is not to be found in the Peerage.

Colledge, who had followed her glance, saw me.

‘Oh, Dugdale,’ he cried, ‘can you tell me anything about tigers’
skins--how long it takes to doctor them into rugs and all that sort of
thing, don’t you know?’

‘I can tell you nothing about tigers’ skins,’ said I curtly. ‘I have
never seen a tiger.’

‘Know anything about lions’ skins, then?’ he sung out with a
half-smile, meant, as my temper fancied, for Miss Temple.

‘The ass in the fable clothed himself in one, I believe,’ said I, ‘but
his roar betrayed him.’

‘Now I come to think of it,’ said he, ‘I believe there are no lions in
India;’ and he looked from me to the girl with a face of interrogation
so full of good temper as to satisfy me that at heart he was a
kindly-natured young fellow.

‘I think I shall walk, Mr. Colledge,’ said Miss Temple.

They joined the folks promenading the weather-deck, and I went to the
recess under the poop to smoke a pipe.

I leaned in a sulky mood against the bulkhead. There was a sense upon
me as of having been snubbed. I was a young man in those days, of an
uncomfortably sensitive disposition. Yet there should have been virtue
enough in that glorious morning to soothe in one’s soul a keener sting
than was to be inflicted by a handsome woman’s scornful glance. The
slight leaning away of the ship from the soft breeze showed a space
over the bulwark rails of the sparkling azure under the sun steeping to
the delicate silver blue of the sky, with a small star-like point of
white in the far-off airy dazzle, marking the topmost cloths of a ship
out there. The white planks under my feet had the glistening look of
sand, now that the decks had been washed down, and had dried out into
a frosting of themselves, as it were, with tiny crystals of brine. The
shadows of the rigging in ink-black lines swung sleepily to the motion
of the fabric. The Chinaman nurse, in a gown of blue, and wide blue
trousers, and primrose-coloured face, and a gleaming tail like a dead
black serpent lying down his back, leaned against a carronade, tossing
the little baby he had charge of till the plump little sweet crowed
again with delight. On the warm tarpaulin over the main-hatch sat the
two ayahs, crooning over the infants they held, often lifting their
eyes, like beads of unpolished indigo stuck into slips of mottled soap,
to the poop, where the mothers of their youngsters were. There was a
taste as of a hubble-bubble in the air, with the faint relish of bamboo
chafing-gear and cocoa-nut ropes. The hubble-bubble, I daresay, was a
fancy wrought by the spectacle of those black faces, and helped by a
noise of parrots somewhere aft.

A length of sail was stretched along the waist, and upon it were seated
several sailors, flourishing palms and needles as they stitched. They
talked together in a low voice that the mate of the watch should not
hear them. At one of the fellows who sat with his face towards me,
I found myself looking as at a curiosity that slowly compels the
attention, spite of any heedless mood you may be in. Many ugly mariners
had I met in my time, but never the like of that man. His right eye
had a lamentable cast; his back was so round that I imagined he had
a hunch. He had enormously long strong arms, with immense fists at
the ends of them, and the sleeves of his shirt being rolled to above
his elbow exposed a score of extraordinary devices in Indian ink
writhing amongst the hair that lay in places like fur upon the flesh.
The bridge of his nose had been crushed to his face, and a mere knob
with two holes in it stood out about an inch above his hare-lip.
Though manifestly an old sailor, salted down for ship’s use by years
of seafaring, his complexion was dingy and dough-like as the skin of
a London baker, with nothing distinctive upon it saving a number of
warts, and a huge mole over a ridge of scarlet eyebrow dashed with a
few grey hairs. His hair, that was of coarse brick-red, hung down upon
his back, as though, forsooth, the ship’s cook had made a wig for him
out of the parings of carrots. Indeed, he was as much a monster as
anything that was ever shut up in a cage and carried about as a show.

I was watching him with growing interest, wondering to myself what sort
of a life such a creature as that had led, what kind of ships he had
sailed in chiefly, and how so grotesque an object had been suffered to
‘sign on’ for an Indiaman, in which one might expect to find something
of a man-of-war uniformity and smartness of crew, when Mr. Sylvanus
Johnson came out from the cuddy, rolling an unlighted cheroot betwixt
his lips.

‘See that chap sitting upon the sail yonder?’ said I--‘a good subject
for a leading article, Mr. Johnson.’

‘Oh confound it, Mr. Dugdale; no sneers, if you please. Let me light
this cigar at your pipe. That fellow is in Emmett’s way, not mine.
Quite a triumph of hideousness, I protest. But what’s the matter
with you, this lovely morning? You look a bit down in the mouth, Mr.
Dugdale. Not going to be sea-sick, I hope, now that all the rest of us
have recovered?’

‘Down in the mouth? Not I. But I’ll tell you what, Mr. Johnson--when
you take charge of your newspaper, will you be so good as to inform the
world that there is nothing under the broad sky more consumedly insipid
than the chattering of a young man and a young woman when they first
meet.’

‘Why, how now?’ said he.

‘Oh, my dear sir,’ cried I, ‘hear them. The unspeakable drivel of
it--the “reallys” and “oh dears” and “yes quites”’--

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Johnson looking at the ash of his cigar after
every puff; ‘I think I know what you mean. But it is the effect of
politeness, I believe. A young gentleman and a young lady who desire
to please will begin very low with each other, lest they should prove
disconcerting. But what d’ye say’--he lowered his voice--‘to the
drivel, as you call it, of a man of advanced years?’--here he looked
into the cuddy, then took a step forward to peer up at the poop--‘of a
person who has seen the world--of a colonel, in short? I wish to be on
good terms with my fellow-passengers; but if that man Bannister goes
on as he has begun, I’m afraid--I’m afraid it will end in my having to
pull his nose.’

He sent another nervous look into the cuddy and frowned upon his cigar
end.

‘Has he been offensive?’ said I.

‘Well, judge,’ he exclaimed, ‘when I tell you that he said there wasn’t
a respectable man connected with journalism; that the calling was
distinctly a tipsy one; that his idea of a journalist was that of a
man lying in bed till his only shirt came from the wash, and inventing
lies to publish to the world when the washerwoman enabled him to clothe
himself.--“And pray, sir,” said I, sneering at him, “what would the
country know of your military achievements if it were not for the
journalist? You army gentlemen profess to despise him; but you will get
up very early to buy his paper if you have a notion that there will be
any mention of your doings in it.”--That was pretty warm, I think?’

‘Rather,’ said I; ‘and what did he say?’

‘He answered that if any other man but myself had said as much, he
would have told him to go and be damned.’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘I hope the passengers may prove a companionable body,
I am sure. For my part, it is more likely than not that my place of
abode whilst the weather permits will be the foretop. Anything to
escape overhearing the insipidity of a chat between a young man and a
young woman when they first meet.’

‘I see,’ said he, ‘that your friend Colledge has hooked himself on to
Miss Temple. I should say he needs to be the son of a nobleman to make
headway with such a Cleopatra as her ladyship. Fine eyes, perhaps; but
a little pale, eh? Give me Miss Hudson. I don’t admire the sneering
part of the sex.’

‘Nor I,’ said I.

‘But every woman,’ said he, ‘has a way of her own of making love. Some
simper themselves into a man’s affection, and some triumph by scorn and
contempt. Do you remember how the Duchess of Cleveland made love to
Wycherley? She put her head out of the coach window and cried out to
him: “Sir, you’re a rascal, you’re a villain!” and Pope tells us that
Wycherley from that moment entertained hopes.’

But by this time my pipe was smoked out; and catching sight of Mynheer
Hemskirk and a passenger named Adams, a lawyer, coming down the ladder
with the notion as I might guess of joining us in the recess that was
the one smoking-room of the ship, I bolted forwards, got upon the
forecastle, and overhung the rail, where I lay for a long half-hour
lazily enjoying the sight of the massive cutwater of the Indiaman
rending the brilliant blue surface, with a clear lift of azure water
either hand of her, that broke into a little running stream of foam
abreast of the cat-heads, and swarmed quietly aft in foam-bells and
winking bubbles, that made one think of the froth at the foot of a
cascade gliding along the crystal-clear breast of a stream to the
murmur of summer leaves and the horn-like hum of insects.




CHAPTER V

A MYSTERIOUS VOICE


Well, all that day the weather held fine and clear; indeed, we might
have been on the Madeira parallels; and I said to Mr. Prance that it
was enough to make one keep a bright look-out for the flying fish. The
sky was of a wonderful softness of blue, piebald in the main, with
small snow-like puffs of cloud flying low, as though they were a fog
that had broken up. A large black ship passed us in the afternoon. She
was close hauled, and, being to leeward, showed to perfection when
she came abreast. Her sails seemed to be formed of cotton cloth, and
mounted in three spires to little skysails, with a crowd of fleecy jibs
curving at the bowsprit and jib-booms, and many stay-sails between the
masts softly shadowed like a drawing in pencil. The lustre lifting off
the sea was reverberated in a row of scuttles, and the flash of the
glass was so like the yellow blaze of a gun that you started to the
sight, and strained your ear an instant for the report.

She was too far off to hail. The captain, standing in the midst of a
crowd of ladies, said that she was an American, and told the second
officer, who had the watch, to make the _Countess Ida’s_ number.

‘Oh, what a lovely string of flags!’ exclaimed Miss Hudson, who stood
near me, following with her languishing violet eyes the soaring of
the mani-coloured bunting as it rose to the block of the peak signal
halliards like the tail of a kite. ‘Is there anybody very important in
that ship that we are honouring him with that pretty display?’

‘No,’ said I, laughing, as I let my gaze sink fair into the sweet
depths of her wonderful peepers. ‘By means of those flags the _Countess
Ida_ is telling yonder craft who she is, so that when she arrives home
she may report us.’

‘Oh, how heavenly! Only think of a ship being made to tell her name! Oh
mamma,’ she cried, making a step to catch hold of her mother’s gown,
and to give it a tweak, as the old lady stood at the rail gazing at
the American vessel from the ambush of a large bonnet, shaped like
a coal-scuttle; ‘imagine, dear: Mr. Dugdale says that the _Countess
Ida_ is telling that ship who she is. How clever men are--particularly
sailors. I love sailors.’

Her melting eyes sought the deck, and the long lashes drooped in a
tender shadow of beauty upon the faint golden tinge of her cheeks.

‘La, now, to think of it!’ cried Mrs. Hudson. ‘Well, those who go down
into the sea, as the saying is, do certainly see some wonderful things.’

Here Mr. Colledge, who did not know, I suppose, that I was conversing
with these ladies, came up to me and said: ‘By the way, Dugdale, what
was that joke of yours about the lion’s skin this morning? Miss Temple
says it was meant for a joke; but hang me if I can see any point in it.’

‘What did I say?’ I asked.

He repeated the remark.

‘Oh, yes; the young lady is right,’ said I, sending a look at her as
she stood near the wheel by her aunt’s side--the pair of them well away
from the rest of us--gazing through a pair of delicate little opera
glasses at the Yankee; ‘it was a joke. What a capital memory you have.
But as to point, it had none, and the joke, my dear fellow, lies in
that.’

‘Well,’ said he, ‘it makes a man feel like an ass to miss a good thing
when a lady is standing by who can see it clearly enough to laugh at it
afterwards.’

‘Yes,’ I exclaimed; ‘very true indeed. What a fine picture that ship
makes, eh? There goes her answering pennant! Let them say what they
will of Jonathan, he has a trick high above the art of John Bull in
shipbuilding.’

I watched his handsome face as he peered at her. He turned to me and
said: ‘D’ye know, there’s a doocid lot of humour in the idea of the
point of a joke lying in its having no point;’ and with that he went
over to Miss Temple, whose haughty face softened into a smile to his
approach; and there for some time the three of them stood, he ogling
the American (that was slowly slipping into toy-like dimensions upon
our quarter) through the girl’s binocular; whilst she talked with him,
as I could tell by the movement of her lips, Mrs. Radcliffe meanwhile
looking on with fidgety motions of her head, and frequent glances at
her niece, the nervous interrogative slightly troubled character of
which was as suggestive to me as to how it stood between them, as if
she had come to my side and whipped out that she was really afraid
that Louise’s character would make the charge of her a worry and a
perplexity.

There was a noble sunset that evening, in the west lay stretched a
delicate curtain of cloud linked in shapes of shell, with dashes here
and there as of mare’s tails; whilst near the sea-line the vapour was
more compacted, still linked, but with a closer inwreathing, as like to
chain armour as anything I can compare it to. When the sun sank into
this exquisite lace of vapour, it lighted up a hundred colours all over
it, which transformed the whole of the western heavens into a most
gorgeous and dazzling tapestry. Never saw I before the like of such a
sunset. But for the visible circle of the glowing mass of the orb, you
would have thought those glorious shooting hues, those astonishing and
sumptuous emissions of green and gold and purple, of rose and brilliant
yellow and shining blue fainting into an unimaginably delicate texture
of green, some phenomenal exhibition of electric splendour. The sea
glowed under this vast display of western magnificence in fifty superb
hues. We all stood looking, whilst the wondrous pageant slowly faded,
the ship meanwhile reflecting the splendour in her sails till they
showed like yellow satin against the soft evening blue gathering over
the mastheads, as she pushed softly through the water, the oil-smooth
surface of her wake lined with the spume broken out by the passage of
her bows lifting tenderly on the swell that was flowing in long lines
to the ship from out of the north-west.

The moon rose late, but it was a fine clear starlit dusk when eight
bells of the second dog-watch floated along the decks and echoed
quietly down out of the wind-hushed spaces of the canvas. The sea swept
black to its confines where the low wheeling stars were hovering like
ships’ lights in the immeasurable distance. The radiance of the cuddy
lamps flung a sheen upon the quarter-deck atmosphere; but away forward
from abreast of the mainmast the ship lay black in the shadow of her
own canvas, with a view of a few dark blotches of the forms of men
moving about the forecastle, their figures showing out against the
brilliant dust in the sky under the wide yawn of the fore-course.

Old Keeling was pacing the deck with studdingsails out on both sides,
as Jack says, that is to say, with a lady on either arm. Other figures
moved here and there; and Mr. Cocker, who had charge of the deck,
walked to and fro from rail to rail with the young fourth officer by
his side, regularly pausing, ere swinging round for the stump back, to
take a peep under the foot of the mainsail or to send a long look into
the weather horizon. Little Mr. Saunders came up to me, spoke of the
beauty of the evening, and asked me to walk. He was a very intelligent
little chap, and had written several works on the superstitions of
various peoples in relation to their treatment of diseases. He was
wonderfully in earnest in all he said, and would again and again in his
enthusiasm come to a stand, raise his arm to catch hold of a button of
my coat, as if to detain me, meanwhile standing on the tips of his toes
and peering up into my face. On the other side of the deck walked my
friend Colledge between Miss Temple and her aunt. Three of the Civil
Service gentlemen were in tow of Mrs. Brookes and her daughters; and
right aft, leaning in picturesque attitude against one of the guns, was
Mr. Sylvanus Johnson airily and in a gallant tone of voice explaining
to Mrs. and Miss Hudson how it was that the sun and moon were sometimes
to be seen shining together. Down in the cuddy, directly under the
after-skylight, sat Colonel Bannister playing whist with his wife, Mr.
Hodder, and Mr. Adams; and almost every time I passed I could hear the
military man’s voice remonstrating with one or the other of them for
having played such or such a card: ‘You should have led the knave, sir.
What on earth, my dear, made you trump spades? No, no; I was right! I
believe I am not to be taught whist at my time of life, sir;’ and so
on, and so on.

By-and-by a bell rang to summon the passengers below to such
refreshments of wine and biscuits and strong waters as they chose to
partake of. The promenaders in shadowy forms melted down the companion
hatchway, and two or three of us only remained on deck. Mr. Colledge
was one of them. He came over to me, staring in my face, to make sure
of me, and exclaimed: ‘I wish they would allow a man to smoke up here.
What is the evil in a pipe of tobacco or a cheroot, that you must go
and sneak into a dark corner to light it?’

‘How is it that you are not below with Miss Temple?’ said I.

‘Oh,’ said he, laughing, ‘I want to make her last me out the voyage,
and that won’t be done, you know, if we see too much of each other.’

‘You are to be congratulated,’ said I, ‘on the compliment she pays you:

  Favours to none, to none she smiles extends;
  Oft she rejects, and oftener still offends.

That’s not exactly how the poet puts it, but it is apter than the
original.’

‘Oh well, you know, Dugdale, she has met some of my people. I don’t
dislike her for holding off. It shows that her blood and instincts
are English; though, faith, when I first saw her I took her to be a
Spaniard. Between you and me, though, the golden headed girl’s the
belle of the ship. What’s her name?--Ah! Miss Hudson. Look at her as
she sits in the light down there! Why, now, if I had your poetical
turn, how would I spout whole yards about her fingers like snowflakes,
and her lips like---- But see here! there’s nothing new in the shape of
imagery to apply to a pretty woman. Oh yes! Miss Hudson’s the ship’s
beauty. But Miss Temple is ripping company, and, my stars! what eyes!’

‘Take care,’ said I, laughing, ‘that you don’t do what the man who
marries the deceased wife’s sister always does--wed the wrong one.
Choose correctly at the start.’

He burst into a laugh.

‘I am already engaged to be married,’ said he. ‘What single man of
judgment would dare adventure a voyage to Bombay without securing
himself in that fashion against all risks?’

I stared into his grinning face, as we stood at the skylight, to
discover if he was in earnest.

‘Keep your secret, Colledge,’ said I; ‘I’ll not peach.’

Here the second-mate interrupted us by singing out an order to the
watch to haul down the fore and main topgallant studdingsails. Then
he took in his lower and main topmast studdingsails. The men’s noisy
bawling made talking difficult, and Colledge went below for a glass of
brandy-and-water. Presently old Keeling came on deck, and after a look
around, and a pretty long stare over the weather bow, where there was a
very faint show of lightning, he said something to the second mate and
returned to the cuddy.

‘In foretopmast studdingsail!’ bawled Mr. Cocker; ‘clew up the
mizzen-royal and furl it.’

A little group of midshipmen hovering in the dusk in the lee of the
break of the poop, where the shadow of the great mainsail lay like the
darkness of a thunderstorm upon the air, rushed to the mizzen rigging,
and in a few moments the gossamer-like cloud floating under the
mizzen-royal truck was melting out like a streak of vapour against the
stars, with a couple of the young lads making the shrouds dance as they
clawed their way up the ratlines.

‘What’s wrong with the weather, Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘that you are
denuding the ship in this fashion?’

‘Oh,’ said he with a short laugh, ‘Captain Keeling is a very cautious
commander, sir. He’ll never show a stun’sail to the night outside the
tropics; and it is a regular business with us to furl the fore and
mizzen royal in the second dog-watch, though it is so fine to-night, he
has let them fly longer than usual.’

‘Humph!’ said I; ‘no wonder he’s popular with lady passengers. I
suppose there is no chance of the ship falling overboard with the
main-royal still on her?’

‘When it comes to my getting command,’ said he, ‘the world will find
that I am for carrying on. What my ship can’t carry, she’ll have to
drag. I’ve made my calculations, and there’s nothing with decent heels
that shouldn’t be able to make the voyage to India in seventy-five
days. It is the trick of wind-jamming that stops us all. A skipper’ll
sweat his yards fore and aft sooner than be off his course by the
fraction of a point. For my part, I’d make every foul wind a fair one.’

He called out some order to the group of shadows at work upon the lower
studdingsail, and I went to the skylight with half a mind in me to go
below and see what was doing there; but changed my intention when I saw
friend Colledge leaning over a draught-board with Miss Temple, Miss
Hudson looking on at the game from the opposite side, and Mr. Johnson
drawing diagrams with his forefinger to Mrs. Hudson in explanation of
something I suppose that he was talking about.

I went right aft and sat myself upon a little bit of grating abaft the
wheel, and there, spite of the adjacency of the man at the helm, I felt
as much alone as if I had mastheaded myself. The great body of the
Indiaman went away from me in a dark heap; the white deck of the poop
was a mere faintness betwixt the rails. Her canvas rose in phantasmal
ashen outlines, with a slow swing of stars betwixt the squares of the
rigging, and a frequent flashing of meteors on high sailing amongst
the luminaries in streaks of glittering dust. There was little more
to be heard than the chafe of the tiller gear in its leading blocks,
the occasional dim noise of a rope straining to the quiet lift of the
Indiaman, the bubbling of water going away in holes and eddies from the
huge rudder, and a dull tinkling of the piano in the saloon, and some
lady singing to it.

All at once I spied the figure of a man dancing down the main shrouds
in red-hot haste. I was going in a lounging way forward at the moment,
and heard Mr. Cocker say: ‘What the deuce is it?’ The fellow standing
on a ratline a little above the bulwark rail made some answer.

‘You are mad,’ cried the mate. ‘What _are_ you--an Irishman?’

‘No, sir.’ I had now drawn close enough to catch what was said. ‘If
I was, maybe I’d be a Papish, and then the sign of the cross would
exercise [exorcise, I presume] the blooming voice overboard.’

‘Voice in your eye!’ cried Mr. Cocker. ‘Up again with you! This is some
new dodge for skulking. But you’ll have to invent something better than
a ghost before you knock off on any job you’re upon aboard this ship.’

‘What is it, sir?’ called the voice of the captain from the companion,
and he came marching up to us in his buttoned-up way, as though he
sought to neutralise the trick of a deep sea roll by a soldierly
posture.

‘Why, sir,’ answered Mr. Cocker, ‘this man here has come down from
aloft with a run to tell me that there’s a ghost talking to him upon
the topsail yard.’

‘A what?’ cried the captain.

‘I ’splained it to the second officer as a woice, sir,’ said the man,
speaking very respectfully, but emphatically, as one talking out of a
conviction.

‘What did this voice say?’ said the captain.

‘I was mounting the topmast rigging,’ replied the man, ‘and my head was
on a level with the tawps’l yard, when a woice broke into a sort of raw
“haw-haw,” and says, “What d’ye want?” it says. “Hook it!” it says. “I
know you.” So down I come.’

‘Anybody skylarking up there, Mr. Cocker?’

The mate looked up with his hand to the side of his mouth. ‘Aloft
there!’ he bawled; ‘anybody on the topsail yard?’

We all strained our ears, staring intently, but no response came, and
there was nothing to be seen. Dark as the shadow of the night was up in
the loom of the squares of canvas, it was not so black but that a human
figure might have been seen up in it after some searching with the gaze.

‘It’s your imagination, my man,’ said the captain, half-turning as
though to walk aft.

‘Up aloft with you again, now!’ exclaimed the second-mate.

‘By thunder, then,’ cried the man, smiting the ratline with his fist,
whilst he clipped hold of it with the other, swinging out and staring
up, ‘I’d rather go into irons for the rest of the woyage!’

By this time a number of the watch on deck had gathered about the
main-hatchway, and stood in a huddle in the obscurity, listening to
what was going forward. On a sudden a fellow leapt out of the group and
sprang into the main rigging.

He hove some curses under his breath at the seaman, who continued
to hang in the shrouds, and went aloft, hand over fist, as good as
disappearing to the eye as he climbed into the big main top. The other
man put his foot on to the rail and dropped on to the deck, where some
of the sailors began eagerly in hoarse hurried whispers to question him.

‘Well, what d’ye see?’ shouted Mr. Cocker, sending his voice fair into
the full heart of the high glooming topsail.

There was no answer; but a few seconds later I spied the dark form of
the man swing off the rigging on to the topmast backstay, down which he
slided in headlong speed. He jumped on to the poop ladder and roared
out: ‘By holy Moses, then, sir, it’s the devil himself! There’s no man
to be seen, and yet a man there is!’

‘And what did he say?’

‘Why,’ he cried, wiping the sweat off his brow, ‘Blast me, here he is
again!’

The brief pause that followed showed the captain as well as the
second-mate, to be not a little astonished. In fact, the fellow was
one of the boatswain’s mates, a bushy whiskered giant of a sailor,
assuredly not of a kind to connive at any Jack’s horse-play or
tomfoolery in his watch on deck and under the eye of the officer in
charge. The captain sent one of the midshipmen for his binocular
glass, the second mate meanwhile staggering back a few paces to stare
aloft. But there was no magic in the skipper’s lenses to resolve the
conundrum. Indeed, I reckoned my own eyes to be as good as any glasses
for such an inspection as that; but view the swelling heights as I
would, going from one part of the deck to another, that no fathom of
the length of the yards should escape me, I could witness nothing
resembling a human shape, nothing whatever with the least stir of life
in it.

‘Well, this beats my time!’ said Mr. Cocker, drawing a deep breath.

‘What sort of voice was it?’ demanded Captain Keeling, letting fall the
binocular with which he had been sweeping the fabric of spar and sail,
and coming to the brass rail overlooking the quarter-deck.

The first of the two men who had been terrified cried out from the
group near the hatchway, before the other could answer: ‘It was exactly
like the voice of Punch, sir, in the Judy show.’

‘Then there _must_ be a pair of ’em!’ roared the other fellow with
great excitement. ‘What I heard was like a drunken old man swearing in
his sleep.’

‘Captain,’ said I, stepping forward, ‘let me go aloft, will you? I’ve
long wanted to believe in ghosts, and here is a chance now for me to
embark in that faith.’

‘Ghosts, Mr. Dugdale? Yet it is an extraordinary business too. There
has been nothing to hear from the deck, has there?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ answered Mr. Cocker. ‘But, Mr. Dugdale, if you will
take the weather rigging, I’ll slip up to leeward; and it’ll be strange
if between us we don’t let the life out of the wonder, be it what it
will.’

I jumped at once into the weather shrouds, and was promptly travelling
aloft with the sight of the figure of the second mate in the rigging
abreast clawing the ratlines, and the frog-like spread of his legs
showing out against the faintness of the space of the mainsail behind
him. We came together in the maintop, and there stood looking up and
listening a minute.

‘I see nothing,’ said I.

‘Nor I,’ said the second mate.

We peered carefully round us, then got into the topmast rigging and
climbed to the level of the topsail yard, where we waited for the
wonderful voice to address us; but nothing spoke, nor was there
anything to be seen.

‘Those two sailors must have fallen crazy,’ said I.

‘There’s no need to go any higher,’ said Mr. Cocker; ‘the topgallant
and royal yards lie clear as rules against the stars. On deck there!’

‘Hallo?’ came the voice of the captain, floating up in a sort of echo
from the hull of the ship, that looked a mile down in that gloom.

‘There’s nothing up here for a voice to come out of, sir.’

‘Then you had better come down, sir,’ called the captain; and I
thought I could hear a little note of laughter below, as though two or
three passengers had collected.

Mr. Cocker’s vague form melted over the top; but I lingered a minute
to survey the picture. My head was close against the maintopmast
cross-trees, a height of some eighty or ninety feet above the line
of the ship’s rail, with the distance of the vessel’s side from the
water’s edge to add on to it. I lingered but a minute or two, yet in
that brief space the shadowy night-scene, with the grand cathedral-like
figure of the noble craft sailing along in the heart of it, was swept
into me with such vehemence of impression that the scene lies upon my
memory clear now as it then was in that far-off, that very far-off,
time. Every sound on deck rose with a subdued thin tone, as though from
some elfin world. There was a delicate throbbing of green fire in the
black water as it washed slowly past the lazy sides of the _Countess
Ida_, and upon this visionary, faintly-glittering surface the form of
the great ship was shadowily depictured, with the glimmer of the deck
of the poop dimly dashed with the illuminated squares of the skylights,
and a point of scarce determinable radiance confronting the wheel
where the binnacle light was showing. The ocean night-breeze sighed
with a note of surf heard from afar in the quiet hollows of the canvas.
There was sometimes a little light pattering of the reef-points,
resembling the noise of the falling of a brief summer thunder-shower
upon fallen leaves. The sea spread as vast as the sky, and you seemed
to be able to pierce to the other side of the world, so infinitely
distant did the stars close to the horizon look, as though _there_ they
were shining over an antipodean land.

‘Aloft there, Mr. Dugdale!’ came dimly sounding from the deck; ‘do you
hear anything more of the voice?’

‘No,’ I answered; but the cry had broken the spell that was upon me,
and down I went, looking narrowly about me as I descended.

I had scarcely gained the poop when there was a commotion on the
quarter-deck, and I heard the voice of the Chinaman exclaiming: ‘What
sailor-man hab seen Prince? What sailor-man, I say, hab seen him? Him
gone for lost, I say? Oh--ai--O; Oh--ai--O! Him gone for lost, I say?’

‘Who in thunder is making that row?’ shouted Mr. Cocker, putting his
head over the brass rail.

The Chinaman stepped out from under the recess, and the cabin lights
showed him up plainly enough. He wrung his hands and executed a variety
of piteous gestures whilst he cried: ‘Oh sah, did you sabbe Prince? Him
gone for lost, I say! Oh--ai--O! Oh--ai--O! Him gone for lost, I say!’
And here he rolled his eyes up aloft and over the bulwarks, and then
made as if he would rush forwards.

‘Is that you, Handcock?’ said Mr. Cocker, addressing a stout man who
stepped out of the cuddy at that moment.

‘Yes, sir,’ answered the fellow, who was indeed the head steward.

‘What’s the matter with that Chinese idiot?’

‘Why, sir, his mistress’s parrot has escaped. He is responsible for the
safe-keeping of the fowl, and he’s just missed him.’

‘Then it’ll ha’ been that bloomin’ parrot that’s been a talking aloft,’
said a deep voice from near the pumps; but I noticed an uneasy shifting
amongst some of the figures standing there, as though _that_ were a
conjecture not to be too hastily received.

‘Here, John,’ shouted Mr. Cocker; ‘come up here, Johnny.’

The Chinaman, who continued to mutter ‘Oh-ai-O!’ whilst he gazed
idiotically about him with much wringing of his hands, slowly and in
attitudes of extreme misery, ascended the poop ladder.

‘Could this parrot talk, John?’ said Mr. Cocker.

‘Oh, him talkee lubberly. Him speakee like soul of Christian gen’man.’

‘What could he say?’ shouted the second mate, evidently desirous that
this conversation should be heard on the quarter-deck.

‘Oh, him say “you go dam,”’ cried John.

‘And what else?’ cried Mr. Cocker, smothering his laughter.

‘Oh, him say “Gib me egg for breakfiss;” and him laugh “haw-haw;” and
him say “hook it” and “whach you wantee;” and he speakee better than
common sailor-man;’ and here he burst out into another long wailing
‘Oh--ai--O! Him gone for drownded. Him gone for lost, I say!’

‘Now you hear what this man says, my lads,’ called Mr. Cocker. ‘Jump
aloft, those of you who are not _afraid_, and catch the bird if you
can.’

The young fourth mate set the example; and in a trice a dozen sailors
were running up the fore main and mizzen, where for a long half-hour
they were bawling to one another, some of them feigning to have caught
the bird, whilst they _kurikity-cooed_ at the top of their pipes, the
Chinaman meanwhile shrieking with excitement as he ran from one mast
to another. But it was all to no purpose. The bird had evidently gone
overboard; probably had attempted a flight with its shorn pinions after
the second of the men who had been frightened had come down in a hurry.
The search was renewed next morning at daybreak; but poor Prince was
gone for good.




CHAPTER VI

WE LOSE A MAN


Spite of Mr. Cocker’s hints as to Captain Keeling’s timidity in the
matter of canvas, the old skipper evidently knew what he was about in
taking in his flying kites in good time, for whilst the seamen were
still scrambling in the rigging and skylarking up there in search of
the parrot, the breeze freshened in a long moaning gust over the rail,
with a brighter flashing of the stars to windward, and a sudden stoop
of the Indiaman that sent a line of water washing along her sides in
milk; and at midnight she was bowing down with nothing showing above
her main topgallant-sail to a strong wind off the beam, the stars gone,
and a look of hard weather in the obscurity of the horizon.

For the next four days we had plenty of wind and high seas with
frequent grey rain-squalls shrouding the ship, and leaving her with
streaming decks and darkened canvas and dribbling gear. It was Channel
weather again, in short, saving that there was the relish of the
temperate parallels in the air, whilst the seas rolled large and wide
and regular with all the difference betwixt the motion of the ship and
her rollicking neck-breaking capers in the narrow waters that you’d
find between the trot of a donkey and the majestical thunderous gallop
of a charger.

But the wet made a miserable time of it. What was there to be seen on
deck save the gleaming forms of men in oil-skins, the sweep of the
dark-green surge out of the near veil of haze, the rain-shadowed curves
of the canvas--the whole fitly put to music by the damp dull clattering
of booms, noises of chafing up aloft, and the wild whistling of the
wind upon the taut weather rigging? The males amongst us who smoked
would come together after meals in a huddle under the break of the
poop, cowering against the weather bulkhead out of the wet of the rain;
and on these occasions arguments ran high. If Colonel Bannister was of
our company, nothing could be said but that he whipped out with a flat
contradiction to it. In fact, he was of that order of mind who reckons
its mission to be that of teaching everybody to think correctly.

Once he endeavoured to prove to Mr. Emmett that he was wanting in an
essential qualification of a painter, namely, an eye for atmosphere,
by requesting him to say how far the horizon was off, and roaring in
triumph because Mr. Emmett answered five miles. Mr. Johnson, after
a careful look at the sea, submitted that Mr. Emmett was right. The
colonel, pulling out his white whiskers, asked how it was possible that
a journalist should know anything about such things. Angry words were
averted by Mynheer Hemskirk, who, with a fat face and foolish smile,
broke in with a mouldy old puzzle: ‘Answer me dis: here iss a bortrait.
I shtands opposite, und I shay, “Brooders und shisters hov I none boot
dot man’s farder iss my farder’s soon! Vot relation iss dot man to dot
bicture?”’ The colonel had never heard this, and asked the Dutchman to
repeat it. Mr. Hodder in a mild voice said: ‘It is himself.’ Little Mr.
Saunders, after thinking hard, said it was his father. ‘_That’s_ it, of
course!’ shouted the colonel. The Dutchman said no, and repeated the
lines with great emphasis, striking one fist into the palm of the other
at every syllable. Then sides were taken merely to enrage the colonel.
Some agreed with him, and some with the Dutchman. Mr. Emmett, feigning
not to catch the point, compelled the stupid good-natured Hemskirk to
repeat the question a dozen times over. So loud was the argument, so
angry the colonel, so excited the Dutchman, and so demonstrative most
of the others of the listeners, that the chief officer came off the
poop to look at us.

I give this as an instance of our method of killing that dreary time.
The old ladies for the most part kept their cabins; but the girls came
into the cuddy as usual, and made the interior comfortable to the eye
as they sat here and there with knitting-needles in their hands or a
book upon their knees.

On one of these foul-weather afternoons, hearing a strange noise of
singing, I entered the cuddy, and found Peter Hemskirk standing with
his face to the company and his back upon one of the Miss Joliffes,
who was accompanying him at the piano. He was singing a fashionable
sentimental song of that day, ‘I’d be a Butterfly, born in a Bower.’
The posture of the man was exquisitely absurd as he stood with his
immensely fat figure swaying to the movements of the ship, a ridiculous
smile upon his face, whilst he held his arms extended, singing first to
one and then to another, so that every one might share in the song. The
picture of this great corpulent man, with an overflow of chins between
his shirt collars, and a vast surface of green waistcoat arching out
like the round of a full topsail, and then curving in again to a pair
of legs of the exact resemblance of a pegtop--standing as he was with
his feet close together--I say, the sight of this immense man singing
‘I’d be a Booterfly’ in falsetto, proved too much for the company. They
listened a little with sober faces; but at last Miss Hudson gave way,
and bent her head behind her mother and lay shaking in an hysterical
fit of laughter; then another girl laughed out; then followed a general
chorus of merriment. But the undaunted Dutchman persevered. He would
not let us off a single syllable, but worked his way without the least
alteration of posture right through the song, making us a low bow when
he had come to an end; whilst Miss Joliffe, darting from the piano
stool, fled through the saloon and disappeared down the hatchway with
a face as red as a powder-flag.

Miss Temple was the only one of us unmoved by this ridiculous
exhibition. She kept her eyes bent on a book in her lap for the most
part whilst Mynheer sang, now and then glancing round her with a face
of cold wonder. Once our eyes met, when she instantly sent her gaze
flashing to her book again. Indeed, it was already possible to see
the sort of opinion in which she was held by her fellow-passengers by
their manner of holding off from her as from a person who considered
herself much too good to be of them, though the obligation of going to
India forced her to be with them. Yet one easily guessed that the other
girls hugely admired her. I’d notice them running their eyes over her
dress, watching her face and bearing at table, following her motions
about the deck; and again and again I would overhear them speaking in
careful whispers about her when she was out of sight. In short, she
might have been a woman of distinguished title amongst us; and if the
passengers gave her a respectful berth, it was certainly not, I think,
because they would not have felt themselves flattered by an unbending
or friendly behaviour in her.

On the following Thursday the wind slackened, the weather cleared, and
midway of the forenoon it was already a hot sparkling morning, with
a high heaven of delicate clouds like a silver frosting of the blue
vault, a wide sea of flowing sapphire, and the Indiaman swaying along
under studdingsails to the royal yards. I had been spending an hour in
my bunk reading. As I passed through the cuddy on my way to the poop I
heard the report of firearms, and on going on deck found Mr. Colledge
and Miss Temple shooting with pistols at a bottle that dangled from the
lee main-yard-arm. Most of the passengers sat about watching them; but
the couple were alone in the pastime. The pistols were very elegant
weapons, mounted in silver, with long gleaming barrels. Colledge loaded
and handed them to his companion, occasionally taking aim himself.

She could not have lighted upon any practice fitter to exhibit and
accentuate the perfections of her figure and face. Her dark glance
went sparkling along the line of the levelled barrel; her lips,
of a delicate red, lay lightly apart to the sweep of the breeze,
that was sweet and warm as new milk; her colourless face under the
broad shadow of her hat resembled some faultless carving in marble
magically informed by a sort of dumb haughty human vitality. I cannot
tell you how she was attired, but her figure was there in its lovely
proportions, a full yet maidenly delicate shape against the clear azure
over the sea-line, as she stood poised on small firm feet upon the
leaning and yielding deck, her head thrown back, her arm extended, and
a fire in her deep liquid eyes that anticipated the flash of the pistol.

‘A very noble-looking woman, sir,’ said a voice low down at my side.

Mr. Richard Saunders stood gazing up at me with the eager wistful
expression that is somewhat common in dwarfs. It was on the tip of my
tongue to ask the poor little chap if he had ever been in love; but he
was a man whose sensitiveness and tenderness of heart obliged one to
think twice before speaking.

‘Ay, Mr. Saunders. A noble woman indeed, as you say,’ I answered as
softly as he had spoken. ‘But how pale is her cheek! It makes you think
of the white death that Helena speaks of in “All’s Well that Ends
Well.”’

‘What Hemmeridge would term chlorosis,’ said he. ‘No, sir; she is
perfectly healthy. It is a very uncommon complexion indeed, and very
fit for a throne or some high place from which a woman needs to gaze
imperiously and with a countenance that must not change colour.’

‘She looks to have been born to something higher than she is likely
to attain,’ said I, watching her with eyes I found it impossible to
withdraw. ‘A pity there did not go a little more womanhood to her
composition. She might make a fine actress, and do very well in the
unrealities of life; but I should say there is but small heart there,
Mr. Saunders, with just the same amount of pride that sent Lucifer
flaming headlong to----’

Some one coughed immediately behind me. I looked round and met Mrs.
Radcliffe’s gaze full. She was seated on a hencoop; but whether she
was there when I came to a stand to view Miss Temple, or had arrived
unobserved by me, I could not tell. I felt the blood rise in scarlet to
my brow, and walked right away forward on the forecastle, greatly, I
doubt not, to the astonishment of little Saunders, who, I believe, was
in the act of addressing me when I bolted.

I went into the head of the ship and leaned against the slope of the
giant bowsprit as it came in the towering steeve of those days, to
the topgallant-forecastle deck, through which it vanished like the
lopped trunk of a titan oak whose roots go deep. The ping of a pistol
report caught my ear. There was a sound of the splintering of glass
at the yard-arm, along with some hand-clapping on the poop, as though
the passengers regarded this shooting at a mark as an entertainment
designed for their amusement. Far out ahead of me, jockeying the
jib-boom, sat a sailor at work on the stay there; his figure stooped
and soared with the lift of the long spar that pointed like the ship’s
outstretched finger to the shining azure distance into which she was
sailing, and he sang a song to himself in hoarse low notes, that to
my mind put a better music to the flowing satin-like heavings of the
darkly blue water under him than any mortal musician that I can think
of could have married the picture to. There were a few seamen occupied
on various jobs about the forecastle. The square of the hatch called
the scuttle, lay dark in the deck, and rising up through it, I could
hear the grumbling notes of a sailor apparently reading aloud to one of
his mates.

Presently the bewhiskered face of the boatswain showed at the head
of the forecastle ladder. On spying me, he approached with the rough
sea-salute of a drag at a lock of hair under his round hat. He had
served as able seaman aboard the ship that I had been midshipman in,
though before my time; this had come out in a chat, and now he had
always a friendly greeting when I met him on deck. He was a sailor of a
school that is almost extinct; a round-backed man of the merchantman’s
slowness in his movements, yet probably as fine a sample of a boatswain
as was ever afloat; with an eye that seemed to compass the whole ship
in a breath, of a singular capacity of seeing into a man and knowing
what he was fit for, most exquisitely and intimately acquainted with
the machinery of a vessel; a delightful performer upon his silver pipe,
out of which he coaxed such clear and penetrating strains that you
would have imagined when he blew upon it a flight of canary birds had
settled in the rigging round about him. The voice of the tempest was in
his gruff cry of ‘All hands!’ and his face might have stood as a symbol
for hard ocean weather, as the bursting cheeks of Boreas express the
north wind. He carried a little length of tough but pliant cane in his
hand, with which he would flog whatever stood next him when excited and
finding fault with some fellow for ‘sogering,’ as it is called; and I
once saw him catch a man of his own size by the scruff of the neck,
and with his cane dust the hinder part of him as prettily as ever a
schoolmaster laid it on to a boy.

‘At the wrong end of the ship, ain’t you, sir?’ he called to me as he
approached in his strong hearty voice.

‘It’s all one to me,’ said I, laughing, ‘now that there’s no music in
the like of that pipe of yours to set me dancing.’

‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, fetching a deep breath. ‘I wonder if ever it’ll
be my luck to knock off the sea and settle down ashore? I allow
there’s more going to the life of a human being than the turning in of
dead-eyes and the staying of masts _plumb_. By the way,’ added he,
lowering his voice, ‘I’m afeerd there’s going to be a death aboard.’

‘I hope not,’ said I; ‘it will be the first, and a little early, too.
Who’s the sick man, bo’sun?’

‘Why, a chap named Crabb,’ he answered. ‘I think you know him. I once
took notice of a smile on your countenance as you stood watching him at
the pumps.’

‘What! do you mean that bow-legged carroty creature with no top to his
nose and one eye trying to look astern?’

‘Ay,’ said he; ‘that’s Crabb.’

‘Dying, d’ye say, Mr. Smallridge?’ I considered an instant, and
exclaimed: ‘Surely he was at the wheel from ten to twelve during the
first watch last night?’

‘So he was,’ answered the boatswain; ‘but he took ill in the middle
watch, and the latest noose is that he’s a-dying rapidly.’

‘What’s the poor fellow’s malady?’ said I.

‘Well, the doctor don’t seem rightly to understand,’ he answered:
‘he’s been forrards twice since breakfast-time, and calls it a general
break-up--an easy tarm for the ‘splaining of a difficulty. But what it
means, blowed if I know,’ he added, with a glance aft, to observe if
the mate had hove into sight.

‘A general break-up,’ said I, ‘signifies a decay of the vital organs. I
don’t mean to say that Crabb isn’t decayed, but I certainly should have
thought the worst of his distemper lay outside.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said he; ‘you wouldn’t suppose that he’d need a worse
illness than his own face to kill him. But this ain’t seeing after the
ship’s work, is it?’ and with another pleasant sea-flourish of his hand
to his brow, he left me.

A little later, I was walking leisurely aft, meaning to regain the poop
for a yarn with Colledge, who stood alone to leeward, looking over the
rail with his arms folded in the attitude of a man profoundly bored,
when the ship’s doctor, Mr. Hemmeridge, came out of the cuddy door to
take a few pulls at his pipe under the shelter of the overhanging deck.

‘So, doctor,’ said I, planting myself carelessly in front of him with a
light swing on my straddled legs to the soft heave of the ship, ‘we are
to lose a man, I hear?’

‘Who told you that?’ he exclaimed, gazing at me out of a pair of moist
weak eyes, which, I am afraid, told a story of something even stronger
than his jalap and Glauber salts, stored secretly amongst the bottles
which filled the shelves of his dark and dismal little berth right away
aft over the lazarette.

‘Why, the air is full of the news,’ said I: ‘a ship’s a village, where
whatever happens is known to all the neighbours.’

‘I don’t know about losing a man,’ said he, striking a spark into
a tinder-box and lighting his pipe with a sulphur match; ‘he’s not
dead yet, anyway. We must keep our voices hushed in these matters
aboard ship, Mr. Dugdale. Wherever there are ladies, there’s a deal of
nervousness.’

‘True; and I’ll be as hushed as you please. But this Crabb is so
amazing a figure, that I can’t but feel interested in his illness. What
ails him, now?’

‘If he dies, it must be of decay,’ he answered, with a toss of his
hand. ‘I can find nothing wrong with him but the manner of his going.
He lies motionless, and groans occasionally. It will be a matter in
which the heart is involved, no doubt.’

I saw my curiosity did not please him, and so, after exchanging a few
idle sentences, I mounted the poop and joined Mr. Colledge.

He was looking at the water that was passing, but not greatly heeding
the sight of it. I daresay, though there was much, nevertheless, to
engage the eye of a lover of sea-bits in the delicate interlacery of
foam that came past in spaces like veils of lace spreading out on the
heave of the sea along with cloudy seethings of milk-white softness
under the surface, which made a wonder of the radiant opalescent
blue of the clear profound there that was softened out of its sunny
brilliance by the shadowing of the high side of the Indiaman.

‘This is going to be a long voyage, I am afraid,’ exclaimed Colledge,
with a sort of sigh, bringing his back round upon the rail and leaning
against it with folded arms.

‘Not bored already, I hope?’ said I.

‘Well, do you know, Dugdale,’ he exclaimed, whilst I caught his eye
following the form of Miss Hudson, who was walking the weather-deck
with Mr. Emmett, ‘I believe I made a mistake in engaging myself before
I started. When a man asks a girl to be his wife, he ought to marry her
with as little delay as possible. Now, here am I leaving the sweetheart
I have affianced myself to for perhaps ten months of ocean voyaging,
with some months on top of it in India for shooting, and the chance
beyond of being eaten up by the game I pursue.’

‘Why did you engage yourself?’ said I.

‘I had been lunching at her father’s house--Sir John Crawley, member
for Oxborough, a red-hot Tory, and one of the noblest hands at
billiards you could dream of. Do you know him?’

‘Never heard of him,’ said I.

‘Well, he rarely speaks in the House, certainly. I had been lunching
with him and Fanny; and as I was not likely to see the old chap again
this side of my Indian trip, he plied me with champagne in a loving
way; and when I walked with Fanny into the garden for a little ramble,
I was rather more emotional than is customary with me; and the long
and short of it is I proposed to her, and she accepted me. Here she
is,’ said he; and he put his hand in his pocket and produced a very
delicate little ivory miniature of a merry, pretty, rather Irish face,
with soft brown curls about the forehead, and a roguish look in the
slightly lifted regard of the eyes, as though she were shooting a
glance at you through her upper lashes.

‘A very sweet creature,’ said I, giving him back the painting. ‘Is not
she good enough for you? Bless my soul, what coxcombs men are! What
is there to fret you in knowing that you have won the love of such a
sweetheart as that?’

He hung his handsome face over the miniature, gazing at it with an
intentness that brought his eyes to a squint, then slipped it into his
pocket, exclaiming with an odd note of contrition in his voice: ‘Well,
I’m a doocid ass, I suppose. But still I think I made a mistake in
engaging myself. There was time enough to ask her to marry me when I
returned. Who knows that I shall ever return?’

‘Now, _don’t_ be sentimental, my dear fellow.’

‘Oh yes, that’s all very fine,’ said he; ‘but I suppose you know that
tiger-hunting isn’t altogether like chasing a hare, for instance.’

‘Don’t tiger-hunt, then,’ said I, growing sick of all this. ‘Hark!
what fine voice is that singing in the cuddy?’

He pricked his ear. ‘Oh, it is Miss Temple,’ said he; and he stole away
to the after skylight, through which a glimpse of the piano was to
be had. He took a peep, then bestowed a train of nods upon me, and a
moment after crept below. Alas! for Fanny Crawley, thought I.

Both of the wide skylights were open, and Miss Temple’s voice rose
clear and full, a rich contralto, with now and then a tremor sounding
through it in an added quality of sweetness. Those who were walking
paused to listen, and those who were seated let fall their work or
lifted their eyes from their books. Mr. Johnson and one or two others
assembled at the skylight. But no one saving friend Colledge offered to
go below. I could have bet a thousand pounds that the cuddy was empty,
or the girl never would have sung. In fact, one took notice of a sort
of timidity in the very hearkening of the people to her, as though she
were a princess whose voice was something to be listened to afar and
with respect, and who was not to be approached or disturbed on any
account whatever. Soon after she had ended, a male voice piped up, and
Mr. Johnson, after listening a little, came sauntering over to me.

‘Your friend Colledge don’t sing ill,’ he exclaimed with the complacent
grin he usually put on before delivering himself. ‘Do you feel equal to
a small bet?’

‘What’s the wager to be about?’

‘I bet you,’ said he, closing one eye, ‘twenty shillings to a crown
that Mr. Colledge and Miss Temple will have plighted their troth before
we strike the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope.’

‘Why not latitude?’ said I.

‘Why, my dear sir, don’t you see that the longitude gives me a
broader margin?’ And the fellow was actually beginning to explain the
difference between latitude and longitude, when I cut him short.

‘I’ll not bet,’ said I; ‘I have no wish to win your money on a
certainty. They won’t be engaged, and so you’d better keep your
sovereign.’

He whistled low, and with a melancholy attempt at a comical cast of
countenance, exclaimed: ‘Ah, I see how it goes. It is the wish, my
friend, that’s father to the thought. But Lor’ preserve us; my dear
Mr. Dugdale, do you suppose that a young lady after her pattern would
ever condescend to cast her eye upon anything even the sixtieth part of
one single degree beneath the level of the son of a baron and heir to
the title and property?’

‘Do you recollect,’ said I, ‘how your name-sake Dr. Samuel Johnson
told his friends that being teased by a neighbour at table to give his
opinion on Horace or Virgil, I forget which, he immediately fixed his
attention on thoughts of Punch and Judy? Suffer me now to imitate that
great man and to think of Punch and Judy.’

‘Here comes Punch, I do believe,’ said he with a good-natured laugh.

As he spoke, up rose the figure of Colonel Bannister from the
quarter-deck. His face was red with temper, his eyes sparkled, and his
white whiskers stood out like spikes of light from a flame. We happened
to be the first persons he came across as he climbed the ladder.

‘Of all infernal instruments,’ he cried, ‘the piano is the worst. What
on earth, I should like to know, do shipowners mean by adding that
execrable piece of furniture to the cabin accommodation? The moment I
sit down to write up my diary, twang-twang goes that scoundrel Jew’s
harp; and as if that noise were not enough, a woman must needs fall
a-squealing to it; and then, when I think that the row is over for
a bit, and I pick up my pen afresh, some chap with a voice like a
tormented hog lets fly.’

‘You should write to the _Times_, sir,’ said Mr. Johnson.

The colonel gave him a look full of marlinespikes and corkscrews, and
walked aft on his short stiff legs to the captain, with whom I heard
him expostulating in very strong language. Presently the tiffin-bell
rang, and I went below.




CHAPTER VII

A SEA FUNERAL


The doctor sat on the starboard side of the table, and I caught him
eyeing me with a meaning expression that somewhat puzzled me. Once,
indeed, he winked, and fearing that he might be a little tipsy and
easily led into a demonstrativeness of manner sufficiently marked to
catch the skipper’s attention, I took some pains not to see him. Old
Keeling, at the head of the table, his face shining like a mahogany
figure-head under a fresh coat of varnish, was in the middle of the
story of his action with the corsair in the Bay of Bengal, when Mr.
Prance entered the cuddy and quietly took his seat. He fell to work
upon a piece of corned beef whilst he seemed to listen with a face of
respectful courtesy to Keeling’s long-winded yarn, with its running
commentary of ‘How brave!’ ‘What dreadful creatures!’ ‘How very
awful!’ and the like from the ladies.

The skipper came to an end, and Mr. Prance said to me: ‘A plucky fight,
sir.’

‘Very,’ said I, watching for that twinkle of eye which his voice
suggested.

‘The best of an engagement of that sort,’ he exclaimed, ‘is that you
may go on fighting it over and over again without loss of blood. By the
way, talking of pirates, the captain has yet to be informed that one of
them lies dead aboard his ship.’

I stared at him.

‘A fellow named Crabb,’ he began.

‘What!’ I interrupted; ‘is Crabb dead then?’

It was now his turn to stare. ‘Do you know the man, Mr. Dugdale?’

‘Why, yes,’ I answered, ‘as the ugliest creature (heaven rest his soul,
since he _is_ dead!) that ever encountered mortal gaze.’

‘But how did you learn that his name was Crabb, and that he was dying?
for _that_ you seem to have guessed also, judging from your question?’

‘Why, my dear sir,’ I answered, ‘you have a large company of sailors
on board, and the ship is full of deep-sea voices, and I carry ears in
my head, Mr. Prance.’

‘Humph!’ said he. ‘Well, as I’ve always said, news travels a deal too
fast aboard passenger craft. In fact, I’ve known passengers to pick up
things which had remained for weeks afterwards secrets to the captain
and mates.’ He emptied a glass of marsala and added: ‘You are right in
speaking of the man’s ugliness. I have been to see him as he lies in
his bunk.’ He made a dreadful grimace and upturned his eyes to the deck
above.

‘Was this Crabb a pirate?’ said I.

‘Ay,’ he answered; ‘but I had not heard of it down to half an hour
ago. The carpenter knew him, but held his tongue when he found him a
shipmate. Now that the fellow is dead, Chips has a yarn as long as the
sea-snake about him. He did business in West Indian waters; and the
carpenter says that if the stories he told against himself were to be
believed, no viler miscreant ever stepped between the rails of a ship.’

‘But did he brag of his evil doings in the forecastle before the men?’
I asked.

‘No; Chips had been shipmate with him two voyages ago in a small craft,
and he afterwards met him ashore in several of the low sailors’ haunts
down in the east end of London. When he had too much drink, he would
out with the most blood-curdling tales of atrocity. No, sir; he kept
his counsel aboard this ship. He knew what would have followed had his
career been suspected by us aft.’

‘When do you bury him?’ said I.

‘To-morrow morning, I suppose,’ he answered. ‘Captain Keeling is averse
to hasty funerals. I’ve heard him say that when he was chief mate, a
man died, and two hours later the body had been stitched up ready for
the last toss; but whilst the captain was looking for his Prayer-book,
the boatswain of the ship came rushing aft with his hair on end and his
eyes half out of his head to report that the hammock with its contents
had rolled off the grating on which it was placed, and was wriggling
about the deck. When it was cut open, the fellow inside was found to be
alive, bathed in perspiration and half-mad with fright.’

This conversation we had carried on in a low voice, easily managed,
as I sat on his right hand close against him. A few minutes later the
mate went on to the poop, and I stepped to the quarter-deck to smoke
a cheroot. Whilst I was preparing the weed to light it, Dr. Hemmeridge
came out of the cuddy.

‘You may be interested to know,’ said he, ‘that your ugly friend is
dead.’

‘And that is what you wished to convey to me by winking?’ said I.

He nodded with a smile that could scarcely be called sober. ‘You took
a particular interest in him,’ he exclaimed, ‘and so I thought I would
give you the news before I made my report to the captain.’

‘You are very good,’ I exclaimed with a sarcastic bow.

‘In fact, Mr. Dugdale,’ he continued, ‘I am going to pay another
visit to the forecastle, as there is something in the manner of this
fellow’s death that puzzles me. Indeed, it is as likely as not I may
make a post-mortem examination.’ Here he lifted his hand and eyed it an
instant. I noticed that it trembled. He immediately grew conscious of
his action, blushed slightly, and spoke with a note of confusion: ‘The
devil of it is, the Jacks object to this sort of inquisitions. Then,
again, the light forward is abominably bad, and there is too much risk
when there are ladies aboard in any attempt to smuggle the body aft.
Would you like to see the man? You admired him in life, you know.’

I hung in the wind a moment, then said: ‘Yes; I will go with you;’ and
we trudged forwards.

The sailors’ dwelling-place was what is called a topgallant forecastle;
a structure in the bows of the ship corresponding with the cuddy and
its poop-deck aft. There was a wing on either hand of it that came very
nearly to abreast of the foremast, for in those times a ship’s foremast
was stepped or erected nearer to the bows than it now stands. Each of
these two wings held a couple of cabins, respectively occupied by the
boatswain, the sailmaker, the carpenter, and the cook. You entered the
forecastle itself by doors just forward of the huge windlass, the great
fore-hatch lying between it and the long-boat that stood in chocks
full of live-stock. It should have been familiar ground to me; yet I
found something of real novelty, too, in the sight as I followed the
doctor through the port door and entered what resembled a vast gloomy
cave, resonant with the sound of seas smitten by the cutwater, with
a slush-lamp swinging amidships under a begrimed beam, and a line
of daylight falling a little beyond fair through the open scuttle or
deck-hatch, and resembling in its dusty shaft and defined margin a
sunbeam striking through a chink of the shutter of a darkened room.

There was at least a score of hammocks hung up under the ceiling or
upper deck, with here and there the faces of mariners showing over
them, or perhaps the half of a stockinged leg, and nothing else of
the man inside but _that_ to be seen. There was also a double tier
of bunks, which wound round from the after bulkhead into the gloom
forward, that seemed the darker, somehow, for the loom of the immense
heel of the bowsprit that came piercing through the knightheads. It
was a rough, wild scene to survey by that light; a blending into a
sort of muddle, as it were, of hammocks and sea-chests and stanchions
and dangling oil-skins and sea-boots and canvas bags, and divers other
odds and ends of the marine equipment. There were figures seated on the
boxes, stolidly smoking, or stitching at their clothes; grim, silent,
unshaven salts, stealing out upon the eye in that strange commingling
of dull light and dim shadow, in proportions so grotesque and even
startling that they hardly needed to vanish on a sudden to persuade one
they were creatures of another universe. Many creaking and straining
noises threaded the hush in this gloomy timber cavern. The motion of
the ship, too, was much more defined here than it was aft, and you felt
the deck rising and falling under your feet as though you were on a
see-saw with a frequent small thunder of cleft sea breaking in.

The doctor made his way to a bunk on the port side, almost abreast of
the scuttle, where the light came sifting through the gloom with power
enough to define shape, and even colour. In this bunk lay a motionless
figure under a blanket, and a small square of canvas over his head. The
bunks in the immediate neighbourhood were empty, and the fellows who
swung in hammocks a little distance away peered dumbly at us, with eyes
which gleamed like discs of polished steel amid the hair on their faces.

Dr. Hemmeridge pulled the bit of sail-cloth from the face of the body,
and there lay before me the most hideous mask that could enter the mind
of any man, saving the master who drew Caliban, to figure. Nothing
showed of the eyes through the contracted lids but the whites. There
was a drop in the under-jaw that had twisted the creature’s hare-lip
into the distortion of a shocking grin.

I took one look and recoiled, and, as I did so, a fellow who had been
watching us at the forecastle door approached and said respectfully:
‘There ain’t no doubt of his being stone-dead, sir, I suppose?’

Hemmeridge turned from the body. There was an odd look of loathing and
puzzlement in his face.

‘Oh yes, man, quite dead,’ he answered. ‘An amazing corpse, don’t you
think, Mr. Dugdale? Good enough to preserve in spirits as a show for
the museum of a hospital.’

‘I hope,’ exclaimed a deep voice from a hammock that swung near, ‘if so
be that that there Crabb’s dead and gone, he ain’t going to be let lie
to p’ison the parfumed hatmosphere of this here drawing-room.’

‘No, my man,’ answered the doctor, looking at the body; ‘we’ll have him
out of this in good time. But there’s nothing to hurt in his remaining
here a bit.’

‘What did he doy of?’ asked an old sailor, who had risen from his
chest, and stood surveying us as he leaned against a stanchion with the
inverted bowl of a sooty pipe betwixt his teeth.

‘Now, what would be the good,’ cried the doctor fretfully, ‘of giving
this forecastle a lecture on the causes of death? What did he die of? A
plague on’t, Mr. Dugdale! Do you know I’ve a great mind to take a peep
inside him, if only in the interests of the medical journals.’

‘I’m beginning to feel a little faint,’ said I, with a movement towards
the forecastle door.

‘Oh well, Mr. Willard,’ exclaimed Hemmeridge, addressing the man
who had approached us, and who proved to be the sailmaker, ‘have
him stitched up as soon as you please, and then get him on to the
fore-hatch with a tarpaulin over him, till other orders come forward.’

‘Are ye likely to hold an inquest, doctor?’ asked the sailmaker, whose
Roman nose and thin frill or streamlet of wool-white whisker running
under his chin from one ear to another gave him a queer sort of
yearning _raised_ haggard look in that light, as he inclined his head
forward to ask the question.

‘Oh, it wouldn’t be an inquest,’ responded the doctor with a short
laugh. ‘But it is death from natural causes, anyway,’ added he in
a careless voice; ‘and so we’ll go aft again, Mr. Dugdale; unless,
indeed, you would like to take another view of your friend?’

I shoved past him, and got out of the forecastle at once; and never
before did the sunshine seem more glorious, nor the ocean breeze
sweeter, nor the swelling heights of the Indiaman more airily beautiful
and majestic. In fact, I had felt half suffocated in that forecastle;
and as I made my way to the poop, I respired the gushing wind as it
hummed past me over the bulwarks as thirstily as ever shipwrecked
sailor lapped water.

That same evening, some time after dinner, after a long smoke and a
yarn with Colledge and young Fairthorne down on the quarter-deck, where
we patrolled the planks in a regular look-out swing from the cuddy
front to the gangway and back again, I went on to the poop, leaving
my two companions to continue a game of chess in the cuddy, where
they had been playing that afternoon. It was a fine clear moonless
night, with a pleasant breeze out of the north-east, before which the
ship was quietly running under all plain sail, saving the fore and
mizzen royals, with a foretopmast studdingsail boom still rigged out
and reeling gaunt athwart the stars to the quiet heave and plunge of
the ship, as though it were some giant fishing-rod in the hand of a
Colossus bobbing for whales.

There were a few passengers moving about the deck, but it was too dark
to make sure of them, though the delicate sheen in the air, falling in
a sort of silver showering from the velvet-dark heaven of brilliants on
high, enabled one to see forms and to follow the movements of things
clearly. There was a deal of phosphorus in the water this night, and I
stood looking over the lee quarter at the pale green or sun-coloured
flashings of it as it swept into the race of our wake in fiery coils,
in configurations as of writhing serpents, in fibrine interwreathings
that would enlarge and shape themselves into the proportions of
sea-monsters and leviathan fish.

‘Is it true, do you know, that one of the sailors died this
afternoon?’ exclaimed a low, clear, but most melodious voice by my side.

It was Miss Temple. She started as I quitted my leaning posture and
turned to her.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ she exclaimed in a changed note.

It was very clear she had mistaken me--for Colledge, for all I can
tell. She was alone. Yet had she come from the cuddy, she must
certainly have seen the young sprig playing at the table with
Fairthorne at chess.

‘I should be glad to answer your question,’ said I coolly, ‘if you care
to stop and listen, Miss Temple.’

By the starlight I could see her fine imperious dark eyes bent on me.

‘It is curious,’ she exclaimed--and perhaps by daylight I should have
found some sign of a smile in her face; but her countenance showed like
marble in that shadow--‘that this should be the second time I have
asked you about what is happening in the ship. You have been a sailor,
I think, Mr. Dugdale?’

‘Mr. Colledge has doubtless told you so,’ said I.

‘Yes; it was he who told me. You share his cabin, I believe. Will you
tell me if it be true that one of the sailors has died?’

‘It is true,’ said I; ‘a sailor named Crabb died this morning.’

‘Has he been buried?’

‘No; that ceremony is to take place in the morning, I believe.’

‘Our ship, then, will sail all night long with a dead body on board?’
she exclaimed with a lift of her eyes to the stars and then a look
seawards. ‘Are not the superstitions of sailors opposed to such
burdens?’

‘Jack does not love dead bodies,’ said I, making as if to resume my
leaning posture at the rail, as one interrupted in a reverie; for
harmless as her questions were, I did not at all relish her haughty
commanding manner of putting them; besides, this was the first time I
had exchanged a sentence with her since that night of the collision
in the Channel; and the unconquerable delight I took in gazing at her
beauty, that _now_, to my ardent young eyes, was idealised by the
starlit dusk by which I surveyed her into graces beyond expression
fascinating, affected me also as a sort of injury to my own dignity,
thanks to the mood that had grown up in me through what I had said and
thought of her. ‘But,’ continued I carelessly, ‘what is regarded as a
superstition by the sailor is a stroke of nature common to us all. One
may travel far without meeting any person who will choose a dead body
for company.’

She walked to the rail a few feet away from where I stood, and looked
at the water for some while in silence, as though she had not heard me.

‘I would rather die anywhere than at sea,’ she exclaimed, as though
thinking aloud, with a sudden crossing of her hands upon her breast, as
if a chill had entered her from the dark ocean. ‘The horror of being
buried in that void there would keep me alive. Oh, if it be true,
as Shakespeare says, that dreams may visit us in our graves--in our
graves ashore, where there are daisies and green turf and the twinkling
shadows of leaves, and often the full moon and the high summer night
shedding a peace like that of God himself, passing all understanding,
upon the dead--_what_ should be the visions that enter into the sleep
of one floating deep down in that great mystery there?’

This was a passage of humour which I was quite young enough to have
coaxed, and have sought to improve in any other fine young woman after
her pattern; but my temper just then happened to be perverse and my
mood obnoxious to sentiment.

‘Why,’ said I, pretending to stare at the water, ‘what’s the difference
between being lowered in a coffin and being hove overboard in a canvas
sack with a lump of holystone at one’s feet, when one doesn’t know it?
If one could believe in the mermaid, in coral pavilions illuminated
with cressets brilliant with sea-fire, in those sweet songs which were
formerly sung by _fishy_ virgins, who swept their lyres of gold with
arms of ivory and fingers of pearl, I believe that when my time came
I should be very willing to take the plunge, in fact _choose_ it in
preference to----’

I brought my eyes away from the water, and saw her figure in the
companion-way down which she floated!

A minute later, Colonel Bannister came along. He approached me close,
staring hard, and said: ‘Oh, it’s you, Dugdale! I thought it was the
second-mate. Here’s a pretty go! There’s a man dead.’

‘He couldn’t help it, colonel,’ said I.

‘Ay, but what did he die of?’ he shouted. ‘I’ve asked Hemmeridge, and
he won’t give the disease a name. I don’t want it to go further, but
betwixt you and me and the bedpost, hang me’--here he subdued his
voice into an extraordinary croaking whisper--‘if I don’t believe
that Hemmeridge’--and he lifted his hand to his mouth in a posture of
drinking. ‘My contention is, they’ve got no right to keep the body.
What’s the good of it? Since Hemmeridge is mute, who’s going to say
that the seaman didn’t die of smallpox? That’s it, you see! Smallpox!
and a crowd of creatures forward who are infernally negligent in
cleanliness, as all sailors are, not to mention a mob of us aft who, if
a plague should break out, must perish. Mind, I say _perish_! Where’s
that second-mate?’

He impetuously crossed the deck and hurried forward on the weather side
of the poop.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said the fellow at the wheel, speaking in a deep,
bass, salt voice; ‘’tain’t for the likes of me to say nothen, leastways
here;’ he made a step to leeward, holding a spoke at arm’s-length,
to expectorate over the rail, and then returned: ‘but I’ve heerd
the bo’sun say as that you’ve been a sailor-man in your day, and I
know that the gent that’s just left ’ee is a sojer. And I should ha’
taken it very koind if, when he told ye that we was an oncleanly lot
forrards, you’d ha’ called him a bloomin’ liar.’

‘So he is, my man,’ said I, ‘whether I tell him so or not.’

‘I’ve been a-sailing in troopships ower and ower again,’ exclaimed
the fellow, half-stifling himself, to subdue his angry voice, ‘and I
could tell that there gent this--that spite of all his pipeclay and the
ship-shape looks of him outside, there ain’t an oncleanlier man than
the _guffy_. You let him know that, sir; and if he dorn’t believe it,
and the capt’n’ll gi’ me leave, smite me! if I won’t ondertake to argue
it out wi’ him to the satisfaction of every party as chooses for to
listen, either aft’--striking the wheel a blow with his immense fist;
‘or forrads’--another blow; ‘or down in the hold’--a third blow; ‘or
up in that there maintop;’ and here he fetched his thigh a whack that
sounded like the report of a firearm.

‘Wheel there! where are you driving the ship to?’ shouted the
second-mate from the forward part of the poop; but merely as an
excuse, I think, to break away from the colonel, who had now tailed on
to him.

As he came rumbling aft, I went forward.

It was the most delicate gentle weather imaginable next morning when I
went on deck an hour before breakfast-time to get a cold bath in the
ship’s head, which to my mind is the very noblest luxury the sea has to
yield: nothing to be done but to strip, drop over the side on to the
grating betwixt the headboards, well out of sight of the poop, where
the spout of the head-pump, as it is called, commands you, and so be
played on for half-an-hour at a spell by some ordinary seaman, who will
be glad to oblige you for the value of a glass of grog. Oh, the delight
past language of the sensation sinking through and through one to the
very marrow that comes with the gushing of the sparkling green brine
pouring away from one in foam back into the flashing heart of the deep
out of which it is sucked!

As I passed the fore-hatch on my way aft, I observed a heap of
something lying under a tarpaulin; at the same moment the boatswain
stepped out of his berth.

‘Have ye heard what time the funeral’s to take place, sir?’

‘Bless me!’ cried I with a start, ‘I had forgotten all about it. Small
wonder that we and our troubles should be compared to sparks that fly
upwards, for we are extinguished in a breath and clean forgotten.’
I glanced at the tarpaulin on the hatchway with an ugly shuddering
recollection coming upon me of the face of the man as I had last viewed
him dead in his bunk. ‘No,’ said I; ‘I am unable to tell you when they
mean to bury him. The sooner the better, I should say.’

‘True for you, sir,’ he answered; ‘here are some of our chaps swearing
that they had bad dreams last night, all a-owing to this here dead man
a-lying here. The fact is Crabb wasn’t no favourite, and since he’s
made his hexit, as the saying is, the men want him gone for true.’

As he said this, the third-mate, Mr. Playford, came forward singing out
for the boatswain.

‘Here, sir,’ answered Smallridge in a voice like the low of a calf.

The officer crossed the hatch, taking care to give the heap under the
tarpaulin a wide berth.

‘Funeral’s to take place at four bells, bo’sun,’ said he.--‘Good
morning, Mr. Dugdale. All hands to be cleaned up and attend. Pity
there’s no more wind, Mr. Dugdale. The trades are consumedly slow of
coming. Four bells, bo’sun, d’ye hear? All hands--the big ensign--four
pall-bearers,’ he added with a grin--‘everything to be ship-shape and
in Bristol fashion--to please the ladies,’ he added, looking at me with
one eye shut.

‘Well, now you know all about it, Mr. Smallridge,’ said I, and walked
aft with Mr. Playford; and the breakfast-bell then sounding, I entered
the cuddy and took my place.

I had thought to catch a glance, perhaps _one_ glance, during the meal
from Miss Temple, who might probably recollect her few words with me
on the preceding evening, and her cool trick of sliding off to let
me talk aloud to myself. But she never turned her eyes my way. She
sometimes spoke across the table to Mr. Colledge, once inclined her
fine figure towards Captain Keeling to respond to some remark of his,
and occasionally exchanged a sentence with her aunt. But the rest of us
might have been as much hidden as the body of Crabb was forward, for
all the attention she honoured us with.

‘I am glad that this funeral is going to take place,’ Mr. Johnson said
to me. ‘I have promised a friend of mine who owns a newspaper in London
a series of articles on this voyage, and down to this time I haven’t
quite seen my way. For what has happened proper to tell? Dash my wig!
saving that collision, of which I couldn’t make head nor tail, and dare
not therefore attempt, what ghost of an incident good for what I may
call word-painting has occurred?’

‘This burial should give you the chance you want,’ said I.

‘Yes,’ he exclaimed; ‘I shall be able to do it justice, I believe. I
am a little uncertain in the matter of nautical terms; and when I’ve
finished the account of it, I should be glad if you’d listen to it,
Mr. Dugdale, and correct any trifling technical errors I may happen
to make. Even now, I’ll be shot if I can tell the difference between
starboard and larboard--never can remember, somehow. The words are so
confoundedly alike, you know.’

‘If I were you,’ said I, ‘I should not suffer ignorance of the sea-life
to hinder me from writing fully about it. Few sailors read; nobody else
understands the calling. Say what you like, and you need only dash your
absurdities into your canvas with a cocksure brush to be accepted as an
authority.’

‘Still,’ he exclaimed, ‘in an account of a funeral at sea I should
like to have the rigging right; nor in a description which,’ added
he complacently, ‘is not likely to be wanting in some of the choicer
qualities of poetry, would it be desirable, insignificant as the error
might be in the eyes of landsmen, to mistake the mainmast for, let me
say, the spanker boom.’

I assured him that I should be glad to hear his account when he had
written it; and soon afterwards we left the table and went on deck.

The ship was this morning a very grand show of canvas. Her yards were
braced just a little forward; the weather clew of the mainsail was up;
all studdingsails to port were on her, and aloft she had something of
the look of a line-of-battle ship with her immensely square yards
rising to the truck, the great hoist of main topsail, with its four
bands of reef-points, enormously thick shrouds and big tops, and all
the heavens over the bow and far to port hidden by space upon space of
cloth, effulgent in the sunshine, and flinging a light of their own
upon the blue air in a sort of liquid gushing of radiance off their
edges, trembling into an exquisite delicacy of outline like a thinness
of ice against the sky. At the peak flew the red ensign half-mast high,
languidly floating in rich brand-new folds of sunny crimson to the
quiet breathing of the wind over the quarter. It was a hint of what
was to come, and you noticed the influence of it upon the passengers,
who talked in subdued voices, and walked thoughtfully, as though it
were the Sabbath and Divine service was shortly to be held. There
was nothing in sight the wide and gleaming circle round, saving the
shoulders of a group of huge cream-coloured clouds down in the west,
looking like the mountainous loom of a snow-whitened country.

Shortly before ten o’clock, Smallridge, taking his stand upon the
forecastle head, applied his silver whistle to his lips, and sent the
shrill metallic summons ringing throughout the length of the ship,
following it with a deep-chested hurricane roar of ‘All hands ’tend
funeral.’ The Jacks had been off work since breakfast time, and to
the boatswain’s melodious invitation they came tumbling out of the
forecastle all in the spruce warm-weather attire of those days--flowing
white trousers, coloured shirts, round jackets, collars lying open to
half way down their breasts, half a fathom of silk handkerchief worked
up into the sailor’s knot, and, for the most part, round hats of straw,
shaped like a tall hat of to-day, but the crown considerably lower.
They came soberly rolling along in bunches of three and four, and
massed themselves forward of the gangway and round about the hatchway,
and the huge pillar of mast shooting up abaft it. In the foreground
stood Smallridge, with three rows of cloth buttons to his jacket, his
storm-beaten face luminous with recent rinsing, and his cheeks framed
by a pair of upright collars such as the negro minstrel of our time
loves to embellish his blackened countenance with. Next him was the
sailmaker, his small blood-stained eyes restlessly rolling themselves
aft upon the people on the poop from either side his high Roman nose.
By his side was the cook, a fat, bilious-looking man; and close to
him the carpenter, a withered old Scotchman, with a face of leather,
puckered into a thousand wrinkles by time, weather, and trials of
temper.

The first, third, and fourth mates took their place a little abaft
the gangway, leaving the second officer on the poop to look after the
ship. A young reefer clad in bright buttons stood at the bell, which
he struck in funereal time, constantly glancing around him to find
some one to exchange a grin with. When all were assembled the skipper
stalked solemnly out of the cuddy, Prayer-book in hand. He was dressed
as the officers were, in a long blue coat with black velvet lapels,
cuffs, and collar, and white jean pantaloons. The only feature that
distinguished his costume from that of the mates was the undecorated
coat-cuffs; whereas the chief-mate had one button on his wrist, the
third-mate three, and the fourth-mate four. Keeling was a man of strong
piety, and his manner of addressing himself to this solemn business
was full of an old-fashioned awe and reverence, which one might look
a long way round among modern sea captains to find the like of, in
such a performance, at all events, as that of burying the remains of a
forecastle hand. Most of the passengers were grouped along the break of
the poop to witness the ceremony. I see that large and stirring picture
very freshly even now: the mass of whiskered faces, one showing past
another, nearly every jaw moving to the gnawing of a quid; Keeling
and his officers in full fig; the many-coloured dresses of the ladies
fluttering along the line of the poop rail; I recall the deep hush that
settled down upon the fine ship, no sound to break it but the tolling
of the bell and a noise of water lazily washing alongside. High above
us the great squares of canvas rose in brilliant clouds, one swelling
to another with a soft swaying of the whole majestic fabric, as though
the vessel were something sentient, and was keeping time with her
mastheads to the mournful chimes on the quarter-deck.

The bell ceased; the midshipman struck ten o’clock upon it; the Jacks
on the quarter-deck made a lane, and down it from forward came four
hearty seamen, bearing upon their shoulders a hatch grating, on which
was the hammock containing the body, covered with England’s commercial
ensign. One end of this grating was rested upon the lee rail; then the
captain began to read the sea funeral service. Mr. Johnson, who stood
near me, stared thirstily at the scene; and methought Mr. Emmett, who
was perched on the rail to windward, rolled his eye over the mass of
colour that softened and brightened as the movement of the ship shifted
the shadows, as though some fancies of a startling canvas to be wrought
out of the spectacle were stirring in his mind. The captain paused in
his delivery; the ensign was whipped off, the grating tilted, and the
white hammock flashed overboard. I was at the lee rail, and glanced
down into the sea alongside as the hammock sped from the bulwark.
But the ocean coffin, instead of sinking, went floating astern like
a lifebuoy, bobbing bravely upon the summer tumble, and lifting and
sinking upon the swell as duck-like as a waterborne lifeboat.

I believe no man saw this but myself, everybody listening reverentially
to the closing words of the skipper’s recital from the Prayer-book. I
walked hastily aft to observe the hammock as it veered into our wake,
and beckoned to Mr. Cocker, who at once crossed the deck.

‘See there!’ cried I, pointing to the thing that was frisking in the
eddies upturned by our keel, and crawling into the distance to the slow
progress of the ship. ‘Friend Crabb seems in no hurry to knock at Davy
Jones’s door.’

‘I expect the fool of a sailmaker forgot to weight the body,’ said he.
‘Unless,’ he added, with a little change in his voice, as if he meant
what he said, whilst he did not wish me to suppose him in earnest, ‘the
chap was too great a rascal when alive to sink now that he’s nothing
but a body.’

‘I thought,’ I exclaimed, ‘that wicked sailors, like Falstaff, had an
alacrity in sinking.’

‘I’ll tell you a fact, then, Mr. Dugdale,’ said he. ‘I was aboard a
ship where we buried a man that had murdered a negro in Jamaica. He was
a ruffian down to the heels of his yellow feet, sir, with a deal worse
on his conscience, in our opinion, than even the blood of a darkey. It
was a dead calm when we dropped him over the side with a twelve-pound
shot at the clews of his hammock. Down he went; but up he came again,
and lay wobbling under the main chains. The captain, not liking such
a neighbour, ordered a boat over with a fresh weight for the corpse.
It was another twelve-pound shot, and down it took him, as all hands
expected. But scarce was the boat hoisted when the chief mate, who
was looking over the rail, sings out quietly: “Here’s Joey again.”
And _there_ lay the hammock just under the mizzen chains. ’Twas lucky
a breath of wind came along just then and sneaked the barque away,
for had the calm lasted, the men would have sworn that the body had
got hold of the ship and wouldn’t let her move. But as to our being
ever able to sink it’--he shook his head, and pointing to the hammock
that was now showing like a fleck of foam in the tail of our wake, he
exclaimed: ‘It’s the same with Crabb. He’s of the sort that Old Davy
will have nothing to do with.’

The boatswain’s pipe shrilled out again; the ceremony was over.
The sailors stalked gravely towards the forecastle, the passengers
distributed themselves about the poop.

‘Quite worth seeing, don’t you think?’ said Mr. Johnson, coming up to
me in the manner of a man fresh from a stage performance that has
pleased him. ‘Only let me be sure of my nautical details, and I believe
I can see my way to a very pretty article, Mr. Dugdale.’




CHAPTER VIII

A STRANGE CARGO


We took the north-east trades on the Canary parallels; but they blew
a very light breeze, occasionally failing us, indeed, with more than
once a positive hint of a shift in the western sky, though no change
happened. Captain Keeling declared that in all his time he never
remembered the like of so faint a trade-wind. Indeed, it threatened us
with a long passage to the equator, and again and again I would feel as
vexed as if I had had command of the ship, and my reputation depended
upon her progress, when I’d come on deck and find the long blue heave
of the swell gushing to our port quarter, just freckled by the delicate
soft wind, with scarce a ripple of weight enough to run into foam, the
weather clew of the mainsail swinging in and out, and the big topsails,
to the curtseying of the ship upon the swell, coming into the masts
with short slaps, which made each sheet hum like a twanged harp-wire
through its yard-arm sheave-hole. Very different was all this from my
own experience of the trades when, for days and days, from twenty-seven
degrees north down to within thirty leagues of the equator, it had been
one long wild thunderous spell of sailing, foam to the hawse-pipes,
every yard and studdingsail boom straining at its brace as a racer at
its bridle, the white water to leeward flashing past in a dazzle, like
foam from the sponsons of a paddle-steamer, and all day long a fine
noise of wind roaring between the masts, and on high the wool-like
clouds of the trades blowing, charged with prismatic hues, transversely
across the line of our course.

Yet we managed to kill the time with some degree of entertainment to
ourselves. Mr. Greenhew and Mr. Riley were head over ears in love with
Miss Hudson, and were beginning to talk sarcasm at each other when
there were people near to listen to their conversation. Mr. Fairthorne
was paying very marked attention to Miss Mary Joliffe. Mynheer Peter
Hemskirk seemed to find something agreeable in the company of Miss
Helen Trevor, an exceedingly fat, blue-eyed girl, with a bunch of
flaxen ringlets falling before each ear, and her hair behind dragged up
to a tall comb that sat in an odd staring way upon her head. There was
some sport in all this for quiet observation. Then there was always a
rubber of whist to be had. Though Colonel Bannister was often in too
peppery a humour to play, his aristocratic falcon-beaked wife was ever
ready and eager to take a hand, and partners were never to be wanting
when Mr. Adam or Mr. Saunders or Mr. Hodder was about.

Colledge and I were good friends, and had long yarns together in our
cabin and on deck. It was, maybe, because we shared a berth that I was
more with him than with the others, though Mr. Johnson once attempted a
stroke of irony by saying that of course my intimacy with Mr. Colledge
had nothing whatever to do with the circumstance of his being the son
of a lord, ‘which,’ added he, ‘speaks well for your heart, Dugdale, for
he has very many excellent qualities.’

‘Mr. Johnson,’ said I, ‘I do not think you very brilliant as a genius,
and I am sure you are not very richly stocked in gifts of satire.
I would advise you to dedicate all you have in that way to your
profession, lest, when you come to set up as a book-critic, you will
find yourself _gastados_, as the Spaniards say--expended.’

But to return to Mr. Colledge: the characteristic I liked him best for
was a certain naïveté. He would speak of his engagement with Fanny
Crawley as a schoolboy might of a like experience, and not seem to know
what to make of it. One day he was lying in his bunk smoking a pipe,
with his leg over the edge, his head propped by his arm, his handsome
face flushed, by the heat, and his soft dark-blue eyes shining as with
wine. I had come warm and fatigued from the poop, and lay stretched
upon the deck on my mattress. We had been talking of Miss Crawley, and
he had lugged her portrait from his breast-pocket to have a look at
it; which indeed was a habit of his when he spoke of her, as though he
could hardly persuade himself that he was engaged without first taking
a peep.

‘Upon my word, Dugdale,’ said he languidly, ‘hang me now, if it was not
for Fanny here, I’d propose to Louise Temple. She’s a ripping girl,
and the sort of woman my father would like; a fine stately presence
for a drawing-room, eh? Figure the dignity with which she would kiss
the hand of a sovereign, making the business quite the other way
about by her salutation, and queening it to the confusion of every
eye. My father doesn’t very much care about Fanny--has no style, he
thinks--nothing distinguished about her.’

‘But you are engaged to her with his sanction, I presume?’

‘I don’t know,’ he answered.

I laughed, and said: ‘Has Miss Temple heard that you’re engaged to be
married?’

‘No,’ he answered with a small air of confusion; ‘there was no need to
tell her. What should there be in such a confession to interest her?
You’re the only person on board the ship that I have mentioned the
thing to. Of course I can trust to _you_,’ said he, soothingly.

‘Trust me!’ I exclaimed, laughing again. ‘There is nothing wrong surely
in this engagement that you should fear the betrayal of the secret of
it? But since it _is_ a secret, it is perfectly safe in my keeping.’

‘Do you think I ought to tell Miss Temple that I’m engaged?’ said he.

‘Well, if you are making love to her,’ said I, ‘it might be as well to
give her a hint that you’re not in earnest.’

‘Oh, but, confound it, I _am_!’ he cried. ‘I mean,’ he added, catching
himself up, ‘I think her a doocidly charming girl, and the most
delightful creature to flirt with that ever I met in my life; but if I
go and tell her I’m engaged’----

‘Well?’

‘It would knock my association with her on the head. It is not as if
Fanny were within reach of an early post. Even if I were disposed to
break off my engagement with her, it must take me some months to do it.
D’ye understand me?’

‘You mean, of course,’ said I, ‘that no letter can reach her under
seven or eight months, unless, indeed, you conveyed one to her by a
homeward-bound ship.’

‘Ay; but putting the homeward-bound ship aside, Fanny could not knew of
my resolution--were it ever to come to _that_--until she received the
letter I posted to her in India; therefore, I should have to consider
myself engaged to her all that time.’

‘No doubt,’ said I, beginning to feel bored.

‘Miss Temple would take that view,’ said he, ‘and that’s why I don’t
choose to tell her the truth.’

‘I don’t quite follow your logic,’ I exclaimed; ‘but no matter. It may
be that you want too much in the way of sweethearts. But so far as your
secret goes, you can trust me to hold my tongue. Possibly, I may admire
Miss Temple as warmly as you do; see qualities in her superior even to
her excellence as a mistress of postures; but I do not yet love her so
passionately as not to wish to see her chastened a bit by the lesson
she is likely to learn from your delight in her society.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he exclaimed, lazily knocking the ashes of his
pipe out through the open porthole.

‘Neither do I,’ cried I, springing to my legs with a loud yawn. ‘Heaven
bless us, my dear Colledge! here are we now, I daresay, a fair thousand
miles from the nearest African headland. Surely we are distant enough
from all civilisation, then, to be clear of the influence of the girls!
Take my advice, and keep your heart whole till you get to India.
There may be a Princess waiting for you there, more likely to value a
tiger-hide offering than Miss Temple; whilst Miss Crawley’s broken
heart will mend apace when she learns that your wife has a black skin.’

‘Oh, hang it all!’ I heard him begin; but I was sick of the subject,
and sauntered forth to see what was doing on deck.

There was very little wind; indeed, here and there about the sea were
glass-like swathes riding the quiet pulse of the long slow swell in
scythe-shaped horns, as though, in fact, there was to be a dead calm
anon. Only the topmost and lightest canvas was asleep; the heavier
cloths hung up and down with no more of life in them than what they
got out of the heave of the ship; and deep as we yet were in the heart
of the North Atlantic, there was, it seemed to me, a true tropic touch
in the aspect of things--in the clear pale blue of the sky; in the
sluggish crawling of the clouds, with their rounded brows stealing out
in a copperish hue; in the wavering of the atmosphere over the hot line
of the bulwarks, as though there was a sort of steam going up from
the wood; in the parched look of the running-gear, and in the salt
glistening of the white planks; in the figures of crimson-faced men,
their feet naked, their arms and chests bare, again and again coming
to the great scuttle butt, lashed a bit forward of the gangway, and
drinking from the metal dipper.

When I arrived on the poop, I found the captain standing aft surrounded
by a number of ladies, directing a binocular glass at the sea over
the starboard bow. The chief mate at the head of the poop ladder was
likewise staring into the same quarter, with Mr. Johnson alongside,
bothering him with questions, and little Saunders on tip-toe, to see
over the rail, fanning his face with a large flapping black wide-awake.

I stepped to the side to look, and saw some object about a mile
distant, that emitted a wet flash of light from time to time. I asked
the mate to lend me his glass, and at once made the thing out to be a
capsized hull of a vessel of about eighty tons. She floated almost to
the line of her yellow sheathing, and the gold-like metal rising wet
to the sun from the soft sweep of the blue brine darted flashes as
dazzling as flame from the mouth of a cannon.

I returned the glass to Mr. Prance.

‘She has not been long in that condition, I think?’ said I.

‘Not twenty-four hours, I should say,’ he answered. ‘I see no wreckage
floating about her.’

‘Nor I. If she had a crew on board when she turned turtle,’ I said,
‘she may have clapped down upon them as you imprison flies under a
tumbler.’

‘God bless us, what a dreadful death to die!’ cried little Saunders. ‘I
can conceive of no agony to equal that of being in a cabin in a sinking
ship and going down with her, and _knowing_ that she is under water and
still settling.’

The little chap shuddered and pulled out a great blue
pocket-handkerchief, with which he dried his forehead.

‘How long could a man live in a cabin under water?’ asked Mr. Johnson.

‘Long enough to come off with his life,’ answered the mate, bringing
the glass from his eye and looking at Mr. Johnson. ‘I’ll give you
a queer yarn in a few words, sir; wild enough to furnish out an A1
copper-bottomed sea-tale to some one of you literary gentlemen. A small
vessel was dismasted ’twixt Tariffa and Tangier in the middle of the
Gut there. All her crew saving one man got away in the boat. The fellow
that was left lay drunk in the cabin. A sea shifted her cargo; shortly
after she capsized and went down. A few days later, that same ship
floated up from the bottom of the sea on to the shore near Tangier. She
was boarded, and they found the man alive in the cabin.’

‘What was the vessel’s cargo, Mr. Prance?’ inquired little Saunders.

‘Oil and brandy, sir.’

‘Don’t you think,’ exclaimed Mr. Johnson, ‘that your story is one that
would be very acceptable to the marines, Mr. Prance, but that would not
be believed by your sailors were you to tell it to them?’

Here the captain, who had been slowly coming forward, accompanied by
half-a-dozen ladies, interrupted us.

‘Mr. Prance.’

‘Sir?’

‘That object yonder is a danger in the way of navigation. I think it
would be kind in us to send a shot at it.’

‘Ay, ay, sir.’

‘We will shift the helm,’ continued old Keeling, in the skewered,
buttoned-up sort of voice and air he was wont to use when addressing
his mates in the presence of the passengers, ‘so as to bring the wreck
within reach of our carronades.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘I expect,’ continued old marline-spike, ‘that she is floating on the
air in her hold rather than on her cargo, even though it be cork; and
if we can knock a hole in her, she will sink.’

Mr. Prance stepped aft to the wheel, and the vessel’s course was
changed. Instructions went forward; and the boatswain, who combined
with his duties the functions of chief-gunner aboard the _Countess
Ida_, superintended the loading of a couple of pieces.

‘Please tell me when they are going to fire, Mr. Riley, that I may stop
my ears,’ cried Miss Hudson, who looked a very lovely little woman that
morning in a wide straw hat and a body of some muslin-like material,
through which the snow of her throat and neck showed, making you think
of a white rose in a crystal vase.

Mr. Greenhew, with a glance full of scissors and thumbscrews, as
sailors say, at Mr. Riley, told Miss Hudson that if she objected to the
noise, he would insist that the gun should not be fired, and would
make it a personal matter between himself and the captain.

‘Not for worlds, thank you very much all the same,’ said Miss Hudson,
sending a languishing look at him through her eyelashes; which, being
witnessed by Mr. Riley, would, I did not doubt, occasion a large
expenditure of sarcasm between the young men later on.

The motion of the ship was very slow, and we had floated almost
imperceptibly down upon the wreck. The skipper then suggested that the
ladies should go aft, and off they went in a flutter and huddle of
many-coloured gowns, Mrs. Colonel Bannister leading the way, and Mrs.
Hudson limping in the wake with her fingers in her ears. A chap with a
purple face and immense whiskers was sighting the piece.

‘Let fly now, whenever you are ready,’ shouted Mr. Prance.

There was a roaring explosion; Mr. Johnson recoiled on to the feet of
Mr. Emmett, who shouted with pain, and went hopping to the skylight
with a foot in his hand. There were several screeches from the
ladies, and methought the whiskers of the colonel, who stood beside
me thirstily looking on, forked out with an added tension of every
separate fibre, to the thunder of the gun and the smell of the powder.
The ball flew wide.

‘Another shot!’ called out Mr. Prance.

Bang! went the piece. I had my eye on the wreck at that moment, and saw
half the stern-post, from which the rudder was gone, and a few feet of
the keel to which it was affixed, vanish like a shattered bottle.

‘That’s done it!’ cried old Keeling with excitement as he stood ogling
the wreck through his binocular. ‘If a hole that’ll let the air out is
to sink her, she’s as good as foundered.’

He had scarcely said this when there was a sudden roar of voices along
the whole length of our ship.

‘See! she is full of men!’

‘Heart alive, where are they coming from?’

‘They’re rising as if they were dead bodies, and the last blast was
sounding.’

‘What’ll they be? What’ll they be?’

‘Defend us! they must all be afloat in a minute and drowning!’

Fifty exclamations of this kind rolled along the bulwarks, where the
sailors had gathered in their full company to watch the effect of the
shot. There was no glass within reach of me; but my sight was keen,
and at the first blush I believed that the hull had been a slaver,
that she had capsized when full of negroes, and that our round-shot
had made a man-hole aft big enough for them to escape through. There
were twenty or thirty of them. They came thrusting through the aperture
with extraordinary agility, and most of them held a very firm seat on
the clean line of the keel. But every now and again one or another of
them would lose his balance and slide down the hard bright surface of
the yellow sheathing upon the round of the bilge plump into the water,
where you would observe him making frantic but idle efforts to reclimb
the wet and slippery slope.

‘Monkeys, as I am a man!’ roared Mr. Prance.

‘A cargo of monkeys, sir!’ shouted the skipper from the other end of
the poop, whilst he kept his glasses levelled at the wreck.

A sort of groaning note of astonishment, followed by a wild shout of
laughter, came along from the Jacks. Indeed, one needed to look hard
at the thing to believe in it, so incredibly odd was the incident. One
moment the wreck was a mere curve of naked yellow sheathing flashing
to the sun as it rolled; the next, pouff! went the thunder of the gun,
and as though its grinning adamantine lips owned some magical and
diabolical potency of invocation, lo! the hole made by the shot was
vomiting monkeys, and in a trice the radiant rounds of the keel-up
fabric were covered with the figures of squatting, clinging, grinning
creatures of all sizes, some like little hairy babies, some like men as
large at least as Mr. Saunders.

‘There’ll be a human being rising out of that hole before long, I
expect,’ said Mr. Prance. ‘He must needs be slower than the monkeys if
he’s a man. How many d’ye make, Mr. Dugdale?’

‘Some thirty or forty,’ said I. ‘But I tell you what, Mr. Prance:
there’ll be none left in a few minutes, for the hull is sinking
rapidly.’

At that instant Captain Keeling sung out: ‘Mr. Prance--have one of the
quarter-boats manned. It is as I thought--the hull was floating on
the air in her hold, and she’s settling fast. We can’t let those poor
creatures drown. Get the main topsail backed.’

A boat’s crew came bundling aft to the cry of the mate; in a mighty
hurry the gripes were cast adrift, and the tackles slackened away with
the men in their places, and the fourth officer in the stern sheets
shipping the rudder as the boat sank. There was a deal of confusion for
the moment, what with the tumbling aft of the sailors, the passengers
getting out of their road, the hubbub of ladies’ voices, and the cries
of the seamen dragging upon the weather main-braces to back the yards.

‘There she goes!’ cried I; ‘there’ll not be many of the creatures
rescued, I believe. Monkeys are indifferent swimmers.’

‘Lively now, Mr. Jenkinson,’ yelled Mr. Prance to the fourth officer,
‘or they’ll all be drowned.’

The chaps gave way with a will, and the boat buzzed towards the patch
of little black heads that rose and sank upon the swell as though a
sack of cocoa-nuts had been capsized out there. All hands stood gazing
in silence. The drowning struggle of a single beast is a pitiful
sight; but to see a crowd perishing, a whole mob of brutes horribly
counterfeiting the aspect and motions of suffering humanity with their
faces and gestures, is painful, and indeed intolerable. The ladies
had come to the forward end of the poop out of the way of the seamen
pulling upon the main brace, and I found myself next to Miss Temple at
the rail.

‘They _are_ monkeys, I suppose?’ she said, swiftly shooting a glance
of her black eyes at me, and then staring again seawards with her pale
face as passionless as a piece of carving, and nothing to show that
she was in the least degree moved by the excitement of the scene of
drowning monkeys and speeding boat, saving her parted lips, as though
she breathed a little fast.

‘They are as much monkeys,’ said I, ‘as fur and tails can make a
creature.’

‘Do you suppose there were living people locked up in that hold?’

‘God forbid!’ said I. ‘It is not a thing to conjecture _now_.’

‘How could those monkeys have lived without air?’

‘Air there must have been, Miss Temple, or they could not have lived.
The story of the wreck seems simple enough to my mind. She was, no
doubt, a little schooner from the Brazilian coast, bound to a European
port with a freight of monkeys, which are always a saleable commodity.
They would be stowed away somewhere aft in the run, perhaps, as it is
called. The vessel capsized, and floated, as Captain Keeling suggested,
upon the air in her. Our cannon-ball knocked a hole in the hulk right
over the monkeys’ quarters, and out they came. I can tell you of more
wonderful things than that.’

‘She must have _capsized_, as you call it, very recently,’ said she,
glancing at me again--it was rarely more than a glance with her, as
though she believed that such beauty as her eyes had entitled them to a
royal privacy.

‘No doubt,’ I answered.

By this time the boat had reached the spot where the hulk had
foundered, and we could see the men lying over the side picking up the
monkeys. I ran my gaze eagerly over the surface there, somehow fancying
that one or more bodies of men might rise; but there was nothing in
that way to be seen. The boat lingered with the fellows in her standing
up and looking around them. They then reseated themselves, the oars
sparkled, and presently the little fabric came rushing through the
water to alongside.

‘How many have you picked up, Mr. Jenkinson!’ cried the mate.

‘Only eight, sir. I believe they were half dead with hunger and thirst,
and had no strength to swim, for most of them had sunk before we could
approach them.’

‘Hand the poor brutes up.’

Some of the Jacks jumped into the chains to receive the creatures, and
they were passed over the rail on to the quarter-deck. Deeply as one
might pity the unhappy brutes, it was impossible to look at them with
a grave face. One of them was an ape with white whiskers like a frill,
and a tuft of hair upon his brow that made the rest of his head look
bald. He had lost an eye, but the other blinker was so full of human
expression that I found myself shaking with laughter as I watched him.
He sat on his hams like a Lascar, gazing up at us with his one eye with
a wrinkled and grinning countenance of appeal grotesque beyond the
wildest fancies of the caricaturist. There was one pretty little chap
with red fur upon his breast like a waistcoat. Some of the creatures,
on feeling the warm planks of the deck, lay down in the exact posture
of human beings, reposing their heads upon their extended arms and
closing their eyes.

‘Bo’sun,’ called Mr. Prance, ‘get those poor beasts forward and have
water and food given them. Swing the topsail yard--lee main topsail
braces.’

In a few minutes the quarter-deck was clear again, with an ordinary
seaman swabbing the wet spaces left by the monkeys, and the ship
quietly pushing forwards on her course.




CHAPTER IX

A SECRET BLOW


At sea, a very little thing goes a very long way, and you will suppose
that this incident of the monkeys gave us plenty to talk about and to
wonder at. At the dinner table that evening old Keeling favoured us
with a long yarn about a French craft that capsized somewhere off the
Scilly Islands with four men in her: how the air in her hold kept her
buoyant; how the fellows climbed into the run and sat with their heads
against the ship’s bottom; how one of them strove with might and main
to knock a plank out, that he might see if help was about, in nowise
suspecting that if he let the air escape the hull would sink; how,
all unknown to the wretched imprisoned men, a smack fell in with the
capsized craft and tried to tow her, but gave up after the line had
parted two or three times; how she finally stranded upon one of the
Scilly Isles; and how one of the inhabitants coming down to view the
wreck, shot away as though the devil were in chase of him, on hearing
the sound of voices inside.

Mr. Johnson whispered to me: ‘I _don’t_ believe it;’ and Colonel
Bannister listened with a fine incredulous stare fixed upon the
skipper’s crimson countenance; but the rest of us were vastly
interested, especially the elder ladies, who, behind old Keeling’s
back, spoke of him as ‘a love.’

We settled it amongst us to purchase the monkeys from the boat’s crew
which had rescued them, leaving the ape for the seamen to make a pet
of. The matter was talked over at that dinner, and I overheard Miss
Temple ask Mr. Colledge to try to secure the little monkey with the
red waistcoat for her. She was the only one of the ladies who wanted a
monkey.

‘Would _you_ like one, Miss Hudson?’ said I.

She shuddered in the prettiest way.

‘Oh, I hate monkeys,’ she cried; ‘they are so like men, you know!’

‘Then, by every law of logic,’ bawled the colonel with a loud laugh,
‘you must hate men more, madam. Don’t you see?--ha! ha! Why do you
hate monkeys? Because they are like men. How much, then, must you hate
men, the original of the monkey!’

He roared with laughter again. In fact, there never was a man who more
keenly relished his own sallies of wit than Colonel Bannister.

Miss Hudson coloured, and fanned herself.

‘I hate monkeys too,’ cried Mr. Greenhew, ‘and for the reason that
makes Miss Hudson averse to them;’ and here he looked very hard at the
colonel.

‘Well, certainly a fellow-feeling don’t _always_ make us kind,’
murmured Mr. Riley in an audible voice, and putting a glass into his
eye to look around him as he laughed.

Here the steward said something in a low voice to Mr. Prance, who
looked at me, and said in a hollow tragic tone: ‘Five of the monkeys
have gone dead, sir.’

I called the news down the table to the captain.

‘I’m sorry to hear it, Mr. Dugdale,’ he answered in a dry voice; ‘but
you don’t want me to open a subscription list for the widows, do ye?’

‘Can any one say if the little chap with the red waistcoat’s dead?’
cried Mr. Colledge.

‘Dead hand gone, sir,’ exclaimed the cockney head steward.

‘What is left of the lot?’ inquired Keeling.

‘The hape, sir; and the two little chaps that was rescued with their
tails half ate up, as is supposed by themselves,’ responded the steward.

Mr. Johnson burst out a-laughing.

‘Tails eaten up!’ cried Mrs. Bannister, poising a pair of gold glasses
upon her Roman nose as she addressed the captain. ‘Are there any sharks
here?’

‘I should say not, madam,’ answered the skipper. ‘It is a trick monkeys
fall into of biting their own tails, as human beings gnaw their
finger-nails.’

‘And when they have consumed their tails, Captain Keeling,’ said Mrs.
Hudson, in a rather vulgar voice, ‘do they go on with the rest of
themselves?’

‘I believe they are only hindered, madam,’ said Keeling, with a grave
face, ‘by discovering themselves, after a given limit, somewhat
inaccessible.’

‘I dislike monkeys,’ said Mrs. Joliffe to Mr. Saunders; ‘but I should
imagine that natural philosophers would find their habits and tastes
very interesting subjects for study.’

The little chap moved uneasily in his chair, with a half-glance up and
down, to see if anybody smiled.

‘The monkey eating his tail,’ exclaimed Mr. Emmett, ‘is to my mind a
very beautiful symbol.’

‘Of what?’ inquired Mr. Hodder.

‘Of a dissipated young man devouring the fortune left him,’ answered
Mr. Emmett.

‘Very true; very good, indeed!’ cried Mr. Adams, the lawyer, with a
laugh.

The death of the monkeys extinguished the scheme of purchasing them.
The one-eyed ape was not to be thought of; and now it was known that
the tails of the other survivors were merely stumps, the subject was
very unanimously dropped, and the three poor beasts left for the
sailors to do what they pleased with.

As an incident, the matter might have served for the day, so dull is
life on shipboard with nothing to look forward to but mealtime. But
something else was to happen that evening.

Two bells--nine o’clock--had been struck. Most of the passengers were
below, for there was a deal of dew in the air, too much of it for the
thin dresses of the ladies, who, through the skylight, were to be seen
reading and chatting in the cuddy, with a party of whist-players at
the table, Mr. Emmett’s and Mr. Hodder’s noses close together over a
cribbage board, and Colledge at chess with Miss Temple, Miss Hudson
opposite, leaning her shining head on her arm bare to the elbow, a
faultless limb indeed, watching them. The breeze had freshened at
sundown. There was a half-moon in the heavens, with a tropic brightness
of disc, and the ocean under her light spread away to its limits in a
surface firm and dark as polished indigo, saving that under the planet
there was a long trembling wake, and an icy sparkle in the eastern
waters, over which some large, most beautiful star was hanging; but
though there was breeze enough to put a merry rippling into the sea,
the feathering of each little surge was too delicate to catch the eye,
unless the white water broke close; and the deep brimmed to the distant
luminaries, a mighty shadow.

The skipper was below; Mr. Cocker had charge of the deck, and I joined
him in his walk. He talked of the monkeys, how the poor wretches had
died one after another in the forecastle.

‘I saw one of them die,’ said he: ‘upon my life, Mr. Dugdale, it was
like seeing a human being expire. I don’t wonder women dislike that
kind of beasts. For my part, I regard monkeys as poor relations.’

‘What were the men laughing at, shortly after we had come up from
dinner?’ I asked.

‘Why, sir, at little John Chinaman. The ape was on the fore-hatch,
secured by a piece of line round his waist. Johnny went to have a look
at him. There was nobody about--at least he thought so. He stared hard
at the ape, who viewed him eagerly with his one eye, and then said:
“I say, where you from, hey?” The ape continued to look. “Oh, you can
speakee,” continued John; “me savee you can for speakee. Why you no
talkee, hey? Me ask where you from? Where you from?” The ape caught a
flea. “How you capsize, hey?” asked the Chinese lunatic as gravely, Mr.
Dugdale, so the men say, as if he were addressing you or me. “Speakee
soft--how you capsize, hey?” This went on, I am told, for ten minutes,
the men meanwhile coming on tip-toe to listen over the forecastle edge
till they could stand it no longer, and their roar of laughter was what
you heard, sir.’

‘A mere bit of sham posture-making in Johnny, don’t you think?’ said I.
‘He might guess the men were listening. Had he been a negro, now. But a
Chinaman would very well know that a monkey can’t talk.’

‘This John is one who doesn’t know, I’ll swear. Besides, sir, the
Chinese are not such geniuses as are imagined. There are thousands
amongst them to correspond with our ignorant superstitious peasantry
at home. I remember at Chusan that four Chinamen were engaged to carry
a piano out of the cabin. Whilst they were wrestling with it on the
quarter-deck, a string broke with a loud _twang_, on which they put the
instrument down and ran away, viewing it from a distance with faces
working with alarm and astonishment. The mate called to know what they
meant by dropping their work. “Him spirit! him speakee,” they cried;
in fact, they would have no more to do with the piano; and when some
of the crew picked it up to carry it to the gangway, the quivering
Johns went backing and recoiling on to the forecastle, as though the
instrument were a cage with a wild beast in it that might at any moment
spring out on them.’

Whilst he was speaking I had been watching a star slowly creeping away
from the edge of the mainsail to leeward, as though it were sweeping
through the sky on its own account on a course parallel with the line
of the horizon. My attention was fixed on what my companion said, and
my gaze rested mechanically upon the star. Suddenly the truth flashed
upon me, and I started.

‘Why, Mr. Cocker, what’s happening to the ship? Are we going home
again? She is coming to rapidly! You will be having all your
stun’-sails there to larboard aback in a minute.’

He had been too much engrossed by our chat to notice this.

‘Wheel there!’ he shouted, running aft as he cried. ‘What are you doing
with the ship? Port your hellum, man, port your hellum!’

I hastily followed, to see what was the matter. The wheel was deserted,
and as I approached, I saw the circle revolve against the stars over
the taffrail like a windmill in a gale. Alongside, prone on the deck,
his arms outstretched and his face down, was the figure of the helmsman.

‘He is in a fit,’ cried the second mate, grasping the wheel and
revolving it, to bring the ship to her course again.

Here Captain Keeling came hastily up the companion steps.

‘Where’s the officer of the watch?’ he shouted.

‘Here, sir,’ answered Cocker from the wheel.

‘Do you know, sir,’ cried the skipper, ‘that you are four points off
your course?’

‘The helmsman has fallen down in a fit, or else lies dead here, sir,’
responded the second-mate.

The skipper saw how it was, and bawled for some hands to come aft. Such
of the passengers as were on deck gathered about the wheel in a group.

‘What is that?’ exclaimed little Mr. Saunders, stooping close to the
prostrate seaman’s head. ‘Blood, gentlemen!’ he exclaimed. ‘See the
great stain of it here! This man has been struck down by some hand.’

‘What’s that? what’s that?’ cried old Keeling, bending his crowbar of
a figure to the stain. ‘Ay, he has been struck down as you say, Mr.
Saunders. Who has done this thing? Look about you, men; see if there’s
anybody concealed here.’

Three or four fellows had come tumbling aft. One took the wheel from
the second mate; and the others, along with the midshipmen of the
watch, fell to peering under the gratings and into the gig that hung
astern flush with the taffrail, and up aloft; but there was nothing
living to be found, and the great fabric of mizzen masts and sails
whitened to the truck by the moon, and the yard-arms showing in black
lines against the stars, soared without blotch or stir, saving here and
there a thin shadow upon the pallid cloths creeping to the movement of
the spars.

Dr. Hemmeridge now arrived. The seaman, who appeared as dead as a
stone, was turned over, and propped by a couple of sailors, and the
doctor took a view of him by the help of the binnacle lamp. There was a
desperate gash on the left side of the head. The small straw hat that
the poor fellow was wearing was cut through, as though to the clip of a
chopper. There was a deal of blood on the deck, and the man’s face was
ghastly enough, with its beard encrimsoned and dripping, to turn the
heart sick.

‘Is he dead, think you?’ demanded the captain.

‘I cannot yet tell,’ answered the doctor. ‘Raise him, men, and carry
him forward at once to his bunk.’

The sailors, followed by the doctor, went staggering shadowily under
their burden along the poop and disappeared, leaving a little crowd of
us at the wheel dumb with wonder, and looking about us with eyes which
gleamed to the flame of the binnacle lamp that Mr. Cocker yet held.

‘Now, _how_ has this happened?’ demanded old Keeling, after a prolonged
squint aloft. ‘Had you left the deck, Mr. Cocker?’

‘No, sir, not for a living instant; Mr. Dugdale will bear witness to
that.’

‘It is true,’ I said.

‘Did no man from forward come along the poop?’

‘No man, sir; I’ll swear it,’ answered Mr. Cocker.

‘Any of you young gentlemen been aloft?’ said Keeling, addressing the
midshipmen.

‘No, sir,’ answered one of them, ‘neither aloft nor yet abaft the
mizzen rigging for the last half-hour.’

The old chap took the lamp out of Mr. Cocker’s hand and looked under
the gratings, then got upon them and stared into the gig, as though
dissatisfied with the earlier inspection of these hiding-places.

‘Most extraordinary!’ he exclaimed; ‘did some madman do it, and then
jump overboard?’

He looked over the sides to port and starboard. The quarter galleries
were small, with bumpkins for the main-braces stretching out from them.
They were untenanted.

‘What was the man’s name, Mr. Cocker?’

‘Simpson, sir.’

‘Was he unpopular forward, do you know? Had he quarrelled lately with
any man?’

‘I will inquire, sir.’

Old Keeling seemed as bewildered as a person newly awakened from a
dream; and, indeed, it was an extraordinary and an incredible thing.
Mr. Saunders and Mynheer Hemskirk, with one or two others who were on
the deck at the time, swore that no man had come aft from the direction
of the forecastle. They were conversing in a group a little forward of
the mizzen mast, and could take their oaths that there was no living
creature abaft that point at the time of the occurrence saving the man
who had been so mysteriously felled to the deck.

‘He most hov done it himself,’ said Hemskirk.

‘What! Dealt himself a blow that sheared through his hat into his
skull?’ cried old Keeling.

‘I’ve been making inquiries, sir,’ said the second-mate, approaching
us, ‘and find that Simpson, instead of being disliked, was a general
favourite. No man has been aft, sir.’

‘Something must have fallen from the rigging,’ said Mr. Saunders.

‘Sir,’ cried the captain in a voice of mingled wrath and astonishment,
‘when anything falls from aloft, it drops plumb, sir--up and down,
sir. The law of gravitation, Mr. Saunders, is the same at sea as it is
on shore. What could fall from those heights up there’--and here he
turned up his head like a hen in the act of drinking,--‘to strike a man
standing at the wheel all that distance away?’

The news had got wind below, and the passengers came up in twos and
threes from the cuddy, asking questions as they arrived, the loudest
and most importunate amongst them, needless to say, being Colonel
Bannister. There was real consternation amongst the ladies at the
sight of the bloodstain. I shall not easily forget the picture of
that poop-full of people: the staring of the women at the dark blotch
against the wheel, whilst they held themselves in a sort of posture of
recoil, holding their dresses back, as if something were crawling at
them; the subdued wondering air of the men, restlessly looking about
them, one going to the rail to gaze over, the dusky form of another
stooping to peer under the gratings, a third with his head lying back
straining his sight at the airy empearled spire of the cloths rising
from the cross-jack to the royal yard, the mizzen-top showing clear
and firm as a drawing in Indian ink against the delicate shimmering
concavity of the topsail. The half-moon rode in brilliance over the
main topgallant yard-arm, and the dark swell rolled in soundless
heavings to the quarter, with the wake of the planet lying in the shape
of a silver fan to half way across the ocean, and not a cloud in the
whole wide velvet-black depths to obscure so much as a thumbnail of
stardust.

‘What has happened, Dugdale?’ exclaimed Colledge, accosting me at once
as he rose through the companion with Miss Temple at his side.

‘A man that was at the helm has been struck down,’ said I.

‘By whom?’ said he.

‘Why, that’s it,’ I answered; ‘nobody knows, and I don’t think anybody
ever will know.’

‘Is he dead?’ asked Miss Temple.

‘I cannot say,’ I responded; ‘his hat was cut through and his head
laid open. There is a dreadful illustration of what has happened close
against the wheel.’

‘In what form?’ she asked.

‘Blood!’ said I.

‘Why, it’s _murder_, then!’ cried Colledge.

‘It looks like it,’ said I, with a glance at Miss Temple’s face, that
showed white as alabaster to the moonlight, whilst in each glowing
dark eye sparkled a little star of silver far more brilliant than the
ice-like flash of the diamonds which trembled in her ears. ‘But be the
assassin what he may, I’ll swear by every saint in the calendar that
he’s not aboard this ship.’

‘Pray, explain, Mr. Dugdale,’ exclaimed Miss Temple in a voice of
curiosity at once haughty and peevish.

I made no answer.

‘My dear fellow, what do you want to imply?’ said Colledge: ‘that the
man was struck down--by somebody out of doors?’ and his eyes went
wandering over the sea.

‘It seems my mission, Miss Temple,’ said I with a half-laugh, ‘to
furnish you with information on what happens on board the _Countess
Ida_. Once again let me enjoy the privilege you do me the honour to
confer upon me;’ and with that, in an offhand manner, I told her the
story as you have it.

‘Did anybody, think you, crawl out of the hind windows,’ exclaimed
Colledge, ‘and creep up over the stern and strike the man down?’

‘No,’ said I.

‘How did it happen, then?’ asked Miss Temple fretfully.

‘Why,’ I answered, looking at her, ‘the blow was no doubt dealt by a
spirit.’

‘Lor’ bless us, how terrifying!’ exclaimed Mrs. Hudson, who, unknown
to me, had drawn to my elbow to listen. ‘What with the heat and the
sight of that blood!’ she cried, fanning herself violently. ‘A spirit,
did you say, sir? Oh, I shall never be able to sleep in the ship again
after this.’

I edged away, finding little pleasure in the prospect of a chat with
Mrs. Hudson with Miss Temple close at hand to listen to us. At that
moment Dr. Hemmeridge made his appearance. He stalked up to the
captain, who stood with his hand gripping the vang of the spanker gaff,
returning short almost gruff answers to the questions fired at him.

‘The man’s alive, sir,’ said the doctor; ‘but he’s badly hurt. I’ve
soldered his wound; but it is an ugly cut.’

‘Is he conscious?’ demanded Keeling.

‘He is.’

‘And what does he say?’

‘He has nothing to say, sir. How should he remember, Captain Keeling?
He fell to the blow as an ox would.’

‘Ha!’ cried the skipper; ‘but does he recollect seeing anybody lurking
near him--has he any suspicion’----

‘Sir,’ answered the doctor, ‘at the present moment his mind has but
half an eye open.’

I made one of the crowd that had assembled to hear the doctor’s report,
and stood near the binnacle stand--close enough to it, in fact, to be
able to lay my hand upon the hood. My eye was travelling from the ugly
patch that had an appearance as of still sifting out upon the white
plank within half a yard of me, when I caught sight of a black lump of
something just showing in the curve of the base of the binnacle stand
betwixt the starboard legs of it. It was gone in a moment with the
slipping off it of the streak of moonshine that had disclosed it to me.
Almost mechanically, whilst I continued to listen to the doctor, I put
my toe to the thing; then, still in a mechanical way, picked it up. It
was a large stone, something of the shape of a comb, with a twist in
the middle of it, and of a smooth surface on top, but rugged and broken
underneath, with a length of about five inches jagged into an edge as
keen as a flint splinter. It was extraordinarily heavy, and might in
that quality have been a lump of gold.

‘Hallo!’ I cried, ‘what have we here?’ and I held it to the glass of
the binnacle to view it by the lamplight.

‘What is that you are looking at, Mr. Dugdale?’ called out old Keeling.

‘Why,’ said I, ‘neither more nor less to my mind than the weapon with
which your sailor has been laid low, captain.’

There was a rush to look at it. Keeling held it up to the moonlight,
then poised it in his hand.

‘Who could have been the ruffian that hove it?’ he cried.

‘Allow me to see it,’ exclaimed little Mr. Saunders, and he worked his
way, low down amongst us, to the captain. He weighed the stone, smelt
it, carefully inspected it, then looked up to the captain with a grin
that wrinkled his large, long, eager, wise old face from his brow to
his chin. ‘A suspicion,’ he exclaimed, ‘that has been slowly growing in
my mind is now confirmed. No mortal hand hove this missile, captain. It
comes from the angels, sir.’

He paused.

‘Lawk-a-daisy, what is the man going to say next?’ cried out Mrs.
Hudson hysterically.

‘Captain Keeling, ladies and gentlemen,’ continued little Saunders,
nursing the stone as tenderly while he spoke as if it had been a
new-born babe, ‘this has fallen from those infinite spangled heights
up there. It is, in short, a meteorolite, and, so far as I can now
judge, a very beautiful specimen of one.’




CHAPTER X

THE HUMOURS OF AN INDIAMAN


The mystery being at an end, most of the passengers, after a brief
spell of loitering and talking, went below, little Saunders leading
the way with the meteorolite, and the captain closing the procession,
to finish the glass of grog; he had been disturbed at by finding the
ship off her course. I was exchanging a few words with Mr. Cocker on
this second queer incident of the day, when the fellow who was at the
wheel exclaimed: ‘Beg pardon, sir;’ and I saw him shift very uneasily
from one leg to the other with a drag of the length of his arm over his
brow, as though he freely perspired.

‘What is it?’ inquired Mr. Cocker.

‘Am I expected to stand here alone, sir?’ asked the fellow.

‘Certainly. What! On a fine night like this? What do you want? That I
should call hands to the relieving tackles?’ cried the second-mate.

The man sent a look up at the stars before answering, with a sort of
cowering air in the posture of his head.

‘One of them blooming boomerangs,’ said he, ‘might come along again,
sir. What’s a man to do if time ain’t allowed him to get out of the
road?’

‘Your having a companion won’t help you,’ said the second-mate.

‘I dunno,’ answered the fellow. ‘Whatever it be that chucks the like of
them things, might hold off at the sight of _two_ of us.’

The second-mate stood looking at him a little, and then burst into a
laugh.

‘Well, well!’ said he; ‘if there’s ever a lead-line to sound the depths
of forecastle ignorance, I allow there must be fathoms enough of it to
belay an end to the moon’s horns.’

Nevertheless he called to one of the watch to come aft and hold the
wheel with the other man, making some allowance, I daresay, for the
superstitious feelings which possessed the sailor, and which were
certainly not to be softened down by the sight of the great bloodstain
close to his feet.

I went below for a glass of brandy, and found the passengers listening
to Mr. Saunders, who, with the meteorolite before him, was delivering
a discourse on that kind of stone, pointing to it with his finger,
speaking very slowly and emphatically, and looking in his wistful way
up into the faces of his audience. Even Miss Temple seemed interested,
and stood listening with her back against the mizzen-mast, the
embellished trunk of which formed a very noble fanciful background
for her fine figure. However, I was more in the temper for a pipe of
tobacco than for a lecture, and was presently on deck again, for after
half-past nine o’clock in the evening we were privileged to smoke
upon the poop. Colledge presently joined me; but in twenty minutes
he gave a prodigious yawn and then went to bed; and I paced the deck
alone, with deep enjoyment of the hush coming to the ship out of the
dark scintillant distance--a silence of ocean-night that seemed to
be deepened to the senses by the marble stillness of the wide white
pinions stealing and floating up in a sort of glimmer of spaces to the
faint mist-like square of the main royal. There was a faint noise
of trembling and rippling waters over the side, and the line of the
taffrail with the two fellows at the wheel rose and fell very softly to
the black secret heave of the long deep-sea undulation. The cuddy lamps
were dimmed, the interior deserted; there was a small group of smokers
on the quarter-deck in the shadow of the bulwark conversing quietly;
abaft the mizzen rigging flitted the dusky form of old Keeling, who had
come up to take a turn or two and a final squint at the weather before
turning in.

Some one emerged through the companion hatch, and, after looking about
him a little, crossed to the lee rail, where I was standing.

‘Is that you, Dugdale?’

‘Yes,’ said I. ‘What’s the matter, Greenhew? Time to be in bed, isn’t
it?’

‘Oh, I say, Dugdale,’ exclaimed the young fellow in a breathless kind
of way, as though the effort to check some fit of merriment nearly
choked him, ‘there’s such a lark down-stairs--in my cabin--Riley, you
know’---- And here he laughed out.

‘What’s the lark?’ I asked.

‘I want you to come and see,’ he answered. ‘I found it out by the
merest accident. Heavens, what capers! And if I don’t contrive some
excuse to introduce Miss Hudson into the cabin, that she may see
him---- Well! well! But come along, though.’

‘But, my good fellow, let me first of all know what I am to see,’ said
I. ‘I am enjoying the silence and coolness of this deck and my pipe
and’----

He interrupted me as he cautiously stared around him.

‘You know, of course, that Riley’s got the bunk under me?’ he exclaimed
in a fluttering voice, as though he should at any moment break out into
a loud laugh; ‘well, you can make him do whatever you like when he’s
asleep.’

‘Go on,’ said I; ‘I may understand you presently.’

‘When I went to my cabin to turn in,’ he continued, ‘I found him in
bed; and imagining him to be awake, I exclaimed, just as a matter
of chaff, you know: “Look out, my friend! There’ll be a meteorolite
crashing clean through my bunk into your head in a minute--so, mind
your eye, Riley!” The moment I said this he hopped out from between
his sheets on to the deck, and stood cowering with his hands over his
head, as if to shelter it. His eyes were shut, and I supposed he was
playing the fool. “Get back into bed, man,” said I; “you can’t humbug
me.” He immediately lay down again in a manner that surprised me, I
assure you, Dugdale; for it was as full of obedience as the behaviour
of any beaten dog. I watched him a little, to see if he opened his
eyes; but he kept them shut, and his breathing proved him fast asleep.
I thought I would try him again. “Hi, Riley!” I exclaimed. “Here’s
Peter Hemskirk come to haul you out of your bunk. Protect yourself,
or he’ll be dragging you into the cuddy, dressed as you are, and Miss
Hudson is there to see you.” Instantly, Dugdale’--here he clapped his
hands to his lips, to smother a fit of laughter--‘he doubled up his
fists and let fly at the air, kicking off the clothes, that he might
strike out with his legs; and thus he lay working all over like a
galvanised frog. You never saw such a sight. Come down and look at him.’

‘Have you observed anything of the sort in him before?’ said I,
knocking the ashes out of my pipe.

‘Never before,’ he answered; ‘but I have him on the hip now. He’s
tried to make a fool of me to Miss Hudson, and this blessed evening
shows me my way to a very pretty rejoinder. Come along, come along!
Should he wake, there can be no performance.’

He went gliding with the step of a skater to the companion, and I
followed, scarcely knowing as yet whether the young fellow was not
designing in all this some practical joke of which I was to be the
victim. We passed through the deserted cuddy, faintly lighted by one
dimly burning lantern, and descended to the lower deck, where the
corridor between the berths was illuminated by a bull’s-eye lamp fixed
under a clock against the bulkhead. The cabin shared by the young men
stood three doors down past mine on the same side of the ship. Greenhew
halted a moment to listen, then turned the handle, took a peep, and
beckoned me to enter. Affixed to a stanchion was a small bracket lamp,
the glow of which was upon Riley’s face as he lay on his back in an
under bunk, unmistakably in a deep sleep. His eyes were sealed, his
lips parted, his respirations low and deep, as of one who slumbers
heavily. The wild disorder of the bedclothes was corroboration enough
of Greenhew’s tale, at least in one article of it.

‘Try him yourself,’ said my companion in a low voice.

‘No, no,’ I answered. ‘I have a sailor’s reverence for sleep. You have
invited me here to witness a performance. It is for you to make the
play, Greenhew.’

He at once cried out: ‘Riley! Riley! the ship is sinking! For God’s
sake strike out, or you’re a drowned man!’

I was amazed to observe the young fellow instantly rise to his knees
and motion with his arms in the exact manner of a swimmer, yet with a
stoop of the head to clear it of the boards of the upper bunk, which
I considered as remarkable as any other part of the extraordinary
exhibition for the perception that it indicated of surrounding
conditions; whilst his gestures on the other hand proved him completely
under the control of the delusion created by his cabin-fellow’s cry.
I also observed an expression of extreme suffering and anxiety in his
face, that was made dumb otherwise by the closed lids. In fact it was
the countenance of a swimmer battling in agony. Greenhew looked on
half choking with laughter.

‘Oh,’ he whipped out in disjointed syllables, ‘if Miss Hudson could
only see him now! Dugdale, you’ll have to find me some excuse to
introduce her here. Her mother must attend too--the more the merrier!’
and here he went off again into a fit, as though he should suffocate.

For my part, I could see nothing to laugh at. Indeed, the thing shocked
and astonished me as a painful, degrading, mysterious expression of the
human mind acting under conditions of which I could not be expected
of course to make head or tail. Riley continued to move his arms
with the motions of a swimmer for some minutes, meanwhile breathing
hard, as though the water’s edge rose to his lip, whilst his face
continued drawn out into an indescribable expression of distress. His
gesticulations then grew feeble, his respiration lost its fierceness
and swiftness and became once more long drawn and regular, and
presently he lay back, still in a deep sleep, in the posture in which I
had observed him when I entered.

‘What d’ye think of _that_?’ exclaimed Greenhew with a face of
triumphant enjoyment.

‘A pitiful trick for a sleeper to fall into,’ said I. ‘I like your show
so little, Greenhew, that I wish to see no more of it.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ he exclaimed; ‘let’s keep him caper-cutting a while
longer. I’ll have a regular performance here every night. It shall be
the talk of the ship, by George!’

As he spoke these words, Riley uttered a low cry, opened his eyes full
upon us, stared a moment with the bewilderment of a man who has not all
his senses, then sat upright, running his gaze over his bedclothes.

‘What is the matter?’ he exclaimed, looking around at us. ‘Who has
been’----

The light and expression of a full mind entered his eyes. He threw his
feet over on to the deck and stood up.

‘Have I been making a fool of myself in my sleep, Dugdale?’ said he.--I
was at a loss for an answer.--He proceeded: ‘I know my weakness. I
have heard of it often enough--at school--from my mother--again and
again since, Dugdale. Greenhew has brought you here to watch me. And
that means,’ cried he, turning fiercely upon Greenhew, ‘that you
have been exercising your humour upon me in my sleep, and instead of
compassionating a painful and humiliating infirmity, you have’----

His temper choked him. He clenched his fist and let fly at friend
Greenhew right between the eyes. Down went the Civil Service man like
a statue knocked off its pedestal; but he was up again in a minute;
and neither of them wanting in spunk, at it they went! It was enough
to make any man die of laughter to see Riley’s very imperfectly clad
figure dancing and manœuvring round Greenhew with the gestures of a
cannibal at a feast-dance, yet all the while handsomely plumping his
fists into his antagonist, who hammered wildly in return with a ruddy
nose and one eye already slowly closing. I threw myself between them,
but could do little for laughing. They fought in silence, so far at
least as their voices were concerned; but the hard thumps they dealt
the bulkhead as they went pommelling each other from side to side,
not to mention their frequent capsizals over boxes, the flight of any
objects, such as boots, which their toes happened to strike against,
might well have caused the occupants of the adjacent cabins to believe
that if this scramble did not signify a rush of people escaping from a
sinking ship, then it must certainly mean a desperate mutiny amongst
the crew accompanied by all the disorder of a struggle for life.

‘For heaven’s sake, stop this!’ I shouted; ‘consider how terrified the
ladies will be. Greenhew, cease it, man. Riley, get you into your bunk
again’----

Here there was a violent thumping upon the door of the cabin.

‘Anybody fallen mad here?’ was bawled in the familiar notes of Colonel
Bannister, ‘or is it murder that’s being done?’

He opened the door and looked in.

‘Vot, in Got’s name, iss happening?’ rumbled the deep voice of Peter
Hemskirk over the military man’s shoulder.

The ship slightly leaned at that moment, and caused the Dutchman to put
his weight against the colonel, with the consequence that the little
soldier was shot into the cabin with Mynheer at his heels.

‘What’s this?’ cried the colonel.

‘I’ll teach you!’ gasped Riley.

‘Haven’t you had enough?’ shouted Greenhew.

‘Seberate ’em! seberate ’em!’ exclaimed Hemskirk. ‘Look, shentlemen,
how Mr. Greenhew bleeds.’

‘What on earth is the matter?’ exclaimed some one at the door.

It was Mr. Emmett. He trembled, and was very pale. He had thrown his
tragedian cloak over his shoulders, and looked a truly ludicrous
object with a short space of his bare shanks showing and his feet in
a pair of large carpet slippers. In fact, by this time the whole of
the passengers were alarmed, the ladies looking out of their doors and
calling, the men hustling into the passage to see, with the sound of
Mr. Prance’s voice at the head of the steps of the hatch shouting down
to know what the noise was about. It was more than I could stand. The
figures of the colonel and the Dutchman and Emmett, not to mention
Riley, coming on top of the absurdity of the fight, proved too much
for me. I took one look at Greenhew, shot through the door, gained my
cabin, and flung myself into my bunk, exhausted with laughter, and
utterly incapable of answering the numberless questions which Colledge
fired off at me.

The noise ceased after a while, but not before I heard the captain’s
storming accents outside my berth. I could also hear the colonel
complaining in strong language of so great an outrage as that of two
young men fighting in the dead of night within the hearing of ladies.
The old skipper insisted on one of the young fellows quitting the cabin
and sharing the berth tenanted by Mr. Fairthorne. Both vehemently
refused to budge. The captain then asked who struck the first blow.
Riley answered that he had, and was beginning to explain, when old
Keeling silenced him by saying that he would give him five minutes to
retire to Mr. Fairthorne’s berth, and that if he had not cleared out by
that time he would send for the boatswain and a sailor or two to show
him the road. This ended the difficulty, as I was told next morning,
and the rest of the night passed quietly enough.

Next day, Mr. Riley put in an appearance at breakfast. On seeing me
he came round to my seat, and in a few words begged me not to explain
the cause of the quarrel, as he had no wish that his peculiarity as
a sleeper should be known to the rest of us. I gave him my word, but
regretted that he should have exacted it, as I wished to talk with
Saunders and Hemmeridge on the very extraordinary manifestations I had
witnessed. It was fortunate, however, that my share in the disturbance
was not guessed at. The colonel, Hemskirk, and the rest imagined that
I had been drawn to the young men’s berth by the noise, as they had,
and no questions were therefore asked me. Mr. Greenhew kept his bed
for three days. It was mainly sulking and shame with him, the others
thought; but the truth was his eye had not only closed, but was so
swollen and blackened as to render him unfit to appear in public. He
sent one of the stewards to ask me to see him; but I had had quite
enough of Mr. Greenhew, and contrived to keep clear of the youth until
his coming on deck made escape from him impossible.

Nothing happened worth noting in the week that followed this business.
The trade-wind blew as languid a breeze as ever vexed the heart and
inflamed the passions of a ship-master. It was to be a long passage, we
all said--six months, Mr. Johnson predicted--and old Keeling admitted
that he had nothing to offer us in the way of hope until we had crossed
the equator, where the south-east trades might compensate us for this
northern sluggishness by blowing a brisk gale of wind.

However, if the dull crawling of the ship held the spirits of us
who lived aft somewhat low, forward the Jacks made sport enough for
themselves, and of a second dog-watch were as jolly a lot as ever
fetched an echo out of a hollow topsail with salt-hardened lungs. There
were a couple of excellent fiddlers amongst them, and these chaps would
perch themselves upon the booms, and with bowed heads and quivering
arms saw endless dance-tunes out of the catgut. Many a half-hour have I
pleasantly killed in watching and hearkening to the forecastle frolics.
The squeaking of the fiddles was the right sort of music for the show;
the Jacks in couples lovingly embracing each other, slided, twirled,
frisked, polked with loose delighted limbs between the forecastle
rails, their hairy faces grinning over each other’s shoulders; or one
of them would take the deck--the rest drawing off to smoke a pipe and
look on --and break into a noble maritime shuffle--the true deep-sea
hornpipe--always dancing it to perfection, as I would think. One such
scene I vividly recall as I sit writing: a tar of manly proportions, a
little way past the forecastle ladder, plain in the view of the poop,
his shoes twinkling, his flowing duck breeches trembling, his arms
folded, or one hand gracefully arching to his head, his straw hat on
nine hairs, his face between his broad black whiskers showing out in
the hue of claret, his little eyes sparkling with the enjoyment of
the measures, and the perspiration hopping off his nose like parched
peas; past him a crowd of storm-dyed faces meditatively surveying him,
gnawing with excitement upon the junks standing high in their cheeks
in their sympathy with the dancer, or pulling their pipes from their
lips with the slow deliberateness of the merchant sailor to expectorate
and growl out a comment upon the capering lively; to the right of
him amidships on the booms the two fiddlers, working their hardest,
and threatening every moment to topple over on to the deck with the
energy of their movements. Far ahead forked out the great bowsprit
and jib-booms, made massive to the eye by the long spritsail yard
and the enormously thick gear of shrouds and guys; on high rose the
canvas at the fore, yellowing as it soared into a golden tinge to the
westering glory that was setting the heavens on fire on the starboard
beam. Oh! it was a sight beautiful exceedingly, with the gilding of the
ropes by the sunset to the complexion of golden wire, and a long line
of blood-red radiance flowing down to the ship from the horizon, and
making a sparkling scarlet of the fabric’s glossy sides, and putting
a crimson star of splendour into every window, with the sweep of the
dark-blue sea coursing in long lines into the east, that showed in a
liquid softness of violet past the wan spaces of the far overhanging
studdingsails.

In this same week about which I am writing, Mr. Colledge, inspired
possibly by the noise of the fiddles forward and the spectacle of the
forecastle jinks, made an effort to get up a dance aft; but to no
purpose. Some of the girls looked eagerly when the thing was suggested;
and certainly Colledge’s programme was a promising one: there was the
wide spread of awning for a ballroom ceiling; there were flags in
abundance to stretch between the ridge-rope and the rail, as a wall of
radiant colours through which the moon would sift her delicate tender
haze without injury to the light of the lanterns, which were to be hung
in a row on either side fore and aft; there was the piano to rouse up
from its moorings below, and to be secured on some part of the deck
where its tinkling could be everywhere heard. There was also a quiet
sea, and a deck whose gentle cradling could but serve as a pulse to the
joyous revolutions of the waltz.

Colledge was enchanted with his scheme, and went about thirstily in
the prosecution of it; but, as I have said, to no purpose. Colonel
Bannister shouted with derision when asked if he would dance; Greenhew
was not yet well of his eye, was extremely sulky, and hung about in
retired places; Riley called dancing a bore; Fairthorne pleaded tender
feet; little Saunders smote his breast to Colledge’s inquiry and said
plaintively: ‘Who would stand up with _me_?’ In short, every man-jack
of us aft, saving Mr. Johnson and myself, declined to take any active
part in the proposed ball; and Colledge, with a face of loathing,
abandoned the idea, vowing to me that he had never met with such a
pack of scarecrows in his life, and that we should have been better off
in the direction of jollity and companionship had the cargo of monkeys
been spared to take the place of our male passengers.

Thus did we somewhat wearily roll our way through the Atlantic
parallels, fanned by a light north-east wind over the quarter, under a
heaven of blue, with the sun in the midst of it splendidly shining, and
a night-sky of airy indigo rich with stars from sea-line to sea-line.
The flying-fish shot from the coppered sides of the Indiaman, but
saving them and ourselves, the ocean was tenantless of life; we sighted
no ship; no bird hovered near us; once only, when it was drawing near
to midnight, I heard the sounds of a deep respiration off one or the
other of the bows--the noise of some leviathan of the deep rising from
the dark profound to blow his fountain under the stars; but there was
no shadow of it to be seen nor break of white waters to indicate its
neighbourhood. It was but a single sigh, deep and solemn, as though old
ocean himself had delivered it out of his heart, and the glittering
heights seemed to gather a deeper mystery from the mere note of it.




CHAPTER XI

A STRANGE SAIL


It was a Friday morning. On going on deck before breakfast for a
pump-bath in the ship’s head, I found as queer a look of weather all
about as ever I had witnessed in my life. A troubled swell, but without
much height or power, was running from the westwards, and the Indiaman
rolled awkwardly upon it with much noise of beating canvas aloft and of
straining spars. The water was of a dull olive tint, with an appearance
of mud in it, as though some violent disturbance at bottom had lifted
the ooze cloudily to the surface. It was hard to tell whether the sky
was blue or slate, so thick, dusty, impervious was it, with here and
there a dim outline of cloud, and patches, so to speak, of a kind of
yellowish blue, where some belly of obscured vapour stooped lower than
the rest; whilst, the whole sea-circle round, there hovered an immense
grummet or ring of a dingy, sooty appearance, like to a line of smoke
left by the funnels of steamers, and hanging in a brown cloud, leagues
in length, in silent motionless weather on the rim of the waters of the
English Channel.

‘Hallo, Mr. Smallridge,’ said I, as I stepped over the rail out of the
head, addressing the boatswain, who was superintending the work of a
couple of hands slung over the bow, ‘what have we yonder?’ and I sent
my gaze at a sail I had now for the first time caught sight of that was
hovering down upon our port quarter some two or three miles distant.

‘A brig, sir, I believe,’ he answered; ‘she was in sight much about the
same place at daybreak. There’s been a little air of wind, but it’s
failing, I doubt.’

‘Making way for something to follow, I fancy?’ said I, casting a look
round the horizon.

‘Ay,’ he answered; ‘that muck’s a-drawing up, and there’ll be thunder
in it too, if my corns speaks right. Niver had no such aching in my
toes as this morning since last Toosday was two year, when we fell in
off the Hope with the ugliest thunderstorm that I can remember south
of the heequator. When my corns begins to squirm I always know that
thunder ain’t fur off.’

‘Well, thunder or no thunder,’ said I, ‘I hope there’s to come wind
enough in the wake of all this to blow us along. We shall be having to
call it sixty days to the Line, bo’sun, if we don’t mind our eye;’ and
giving him a friendly nod, I made my way to my cabin to finish dressing.

The gloomy appearance continued all the morning without the least
change. The wind fell dead; and a prodigious hush overhung the sea, a
stillness that grew absolutely overwhelming to the fancy, if you gave
your mind to it, and stood watching the heave of the swell running in
ugly green heaps without a sound. Noises were curiously distinct. The
voice of a man hailing the forecastle from the foretopmast cross-trees
sounded on the poop as though he had called from the maintop. A laugh
from near the wheel had a startlingly near note, though it came to you
along the whole length of the after-deck. The water brimming to the
channels alongside to the stoop of the hull sent the oddest hollowest
sobbing tone into the air, as though some monster were strangling
alongside. Halliards had been let go and sails clewed up and hauled
down, and the _Countess Ida_ lay with something of a naked look as she
wallowed with the clumsiness of a wide-beamed ship under topsails and
fore course; and all the rest of the square canvas, saving the royals
and mizzen topgallant-sail, which were furled, swinging in and out
festooned by the grip of the gear.

By noon the sail that I had noticed early that morning had neared us in
some insensible fashion till she hung something more than a mile away
off the quarter as before. I had several times examined her with the
telescope and was not a little impressed by her appearance. She was a
brig of about two hundred and sixty tons; a most beautiful and perfect
model, indeed, with a clipper lift of bow and a knife-like cutwater and
a long wonderfully graceful arching sweep of side rounding into the
very perfection of a run. Her copper came high, and was very clean,
as though she were fresh from port. Her masts were singularly lofty
for her size, both of them tapering away into skysail poles with yards
across; but she had furled all canvas down to her two topsails and
foresail, and lay rolling heavily, lifting her symmetrical fabric to
the height of the swell, when she would be hove out against the ugly
sulky background in such keen relief that her rigging glanced like
hairs as it came from the mastheads to the channels, with a white, odd,
almost ghastly stare in her canvas that was brilliant as cotton; then
down she would sink behind some sullen almost livid peak till she was
hidden to the reef-band of her fore-course.

Throughout the morning I had observed Captain Keeling somewhat
restlessly examining her; that is to say, he would send looks enough
at her through his binocular glass to suggest that he found something
unusual, perhaps disturbing, in her appearance. There were no sights to
be had, though the old fellow and his two mates stood about the deck,
sextants in hands, occasionally lifting their eyes to that part of the
sky where the sun was supposed to be. Observing Mr. Prance at the rail,
steadfastly observing the brig down upon the quarter, I went up to him.

‘Pray what do you find in that craft yonder, Mr. Prance, to interest
you? The skipper does not seem able to keep his glass off her.’

‘What do _you_ see, Mr. Dugdale?’ he answered, viewing me out of the
corners of his eyes without turning his head. ‘Come, you have been a
sailor. What is _your_ notion of her?’

‘She’s a beauty, anyway,’ I answered; ‘no builder’s yard ever turned
out anything sweeter in the shape of a hull--a trifle too lofty,
perhaps. For my part, I hate everything above royals. Give me short
mastheads, the royal-yard sitting close under the track, English
frigate-fashion’--I was proceeding.

‘No, no; I don’t mean that, Mr. Dugdale,’ he interrupted with a hint of
a seaman’s impatience at my criticism.

‘What, then?’ I asked.

‘Does she look honest, think you?’ said he.

‘Ha!’ cried I: ‘now I understand.’

‘Hush! not a word if you please,’ he exclaimed with a glance along the
poop; ‘the ladies must on no account be frightened, and it is but a
mere suspicion on Captain Keeling’s part at best. Yet he has had some
acquaintance with gentry of her kind, if, indeed, yonder chap be of the
denomination he conjectures.’

‘She must have been stealthily sneaking down upon us,’ I exclaimed,
‘to occupy her present position, otherwise she should be a league
distant out on the beam. But then such a hull as that must yield to
a catspaw that wouldn’t blow a feather out of the _Countess Ida’s_
mizzen-top. What has been seen to excite misgiving, Mr. Prance?’

‘Too many of a crew, sir,’ he answered; ‘the outline of a long-tom on
her forecastle, but ill-concealed by the raffle thrown over it. Six
guns of a side, Mr. Dugdale, though the closed ports hide their grins.’

‘She will not attempt anything with a big chap like us, surely.’

At that moment the captain called him, and he walked aft.

Presently, it sensibly darkened, as though to the passage of some
denser sheet of vapour crawling through the heart of the obscurity on
high. The sea turned of an oil-like smoothness, and ran in folds as
of liquid bottle-green glass out of the grimy shadow that was slowly
thickening all away round the ocean limit. The order was given to furl
the clewed-up sails and to reef the topsails. The boatswain’s pipe
summoned all hands to this work, and the ship for a while was full of
life and commotion. However, by this time the secret of old Keeling’s
uneasiness had in some way leaked out; in fact, the skipper could no
longer have kept the people in ignorance of his suspicions; for some
ten minutes or so before the tiffin bell rang, after the hands had come
down from aloft, the order was quietly sent along to see all clear
for action; and as I took my seat at table, being close to the cuddy
front, as my chair brought me with a clear view of the quarter-deck
through the open windows, I could observe the men preparing our little
show of carronades, removing the tompions, placing rams, sponges,
train-tackles, and the like at hand, and passing shot and chests of
small-arms through the main hatch.

Captain Keeling, stiff, and bolstered up as usual in his brass-buttoned
frock coat, his face of a deeper rubicund from some recent touch of
soap and towel, seated himself at the head of the table; but Prance
and the other mates remained on deck. One noticed a deal of uneasiness
amongst the ladies, saving Miss Temple whose haughty beautiful face
wore its ordinary impassive expression. There was no coquetry in the
startled eyes that Miss Hudson rolled around. Mrs. Bannister fanned
herself vehemently, and ate nothing. There were some of us males,
too, who looked as if we didn’t like it. Mr. Emmett was exceedingly
thoughtful; Mr. Fairthorne drank thirstily, and pulled incessantly
at his little sprouting moustache; Mr. Hodder watched old Keeling
continuously; and Mr. Riley made much of his eye-glass. Nothing to the
point was said for a little while; then the colonel rapped out:

‘I say, captain, have you any notion as to the nationality of that chap
whom your people are making ready to resist?’

‘No, sir,’ answered Keeling stiffly; ‘we gave her a sight of our ensign
this morning; but she showed no colours in return, and I am not a man
to keep my hat off to one who will not respond.’

‘Dot iss my vay,’ exclaimed Peter Hemskirk, bestowing a train of nods
on the skipper.

‘But, captain,’ said Mrs. Joliffe, a nervous gentle-faced middle-aged
lady, with soft white hair, ‘have you any good reason for supposing
that the ship may prove dangerous to us?’

‘Madam,’ responded Keeling with a bow, and you noticed the prevailing
condition amongst us by the general nervous inclining of ears towards
the old fellow to catch what he said, ‘there is reason to believe that
certain Spaniards of the island of Cuba have equipped two or three
smart vessels to act the part of marine highwaymen. The authorities
wink at the business, I am told. Their practice is to bring ships to
and board them, and plunder the best of what they may come across. Last
year, a West Indiaman named the _Jamaica Belle_ was overhauled by one
of these craft, who took specie amounting to twelve thousand pounds out
of her. I believe they are not cut-throats in the old piratic sense.’

‘Oh, don’t speak of cut-throats!’ cried Mrs. Hudson. ‘Will they dare to
attack us--the monsters!’

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Keeling, ‘pray, clearly understand: my
suspicions of the stranger may be ill-founded. Meanwhile, our business
is to put ourselves in a posture of defence, ready for whatever may
happen.’

‘Certainly,’ exclaimed the colonel very emphatically with a look round;
and then speaking with his eyes fixed upon Mr. Johnson; ‘I presume
we shall be able to count upon all our male friends here assembled to
assist your crew to the utmost of their powers, should the stranger
make any attempt upon this ship?’

‘We shall expect you to cover yourself with glory, colonel,’ said Mr.
Johnson, in a familiar sarcastic voice; ‘and I shall be happy to write
and print a full description of your behaviour, sir.’

‘I am quite willing to fight,’ exclaimed Mr. Fairthorne in an
effeminate voice. ‘I mean that I shall be glad to thoot; but I am no
thwordthman.’

‘Possengers hov no beesness to vight,’ exclaimed Mynheer Hemskirk,
enlarging his immense waistcoat by obtruding his chest; ‘dey gets in
der vay of dem as knows vot to do.’

Miss Temple bit her lip to conceal a smile.

‘That’s all very well,’ exclaimed Riley, talking at Miss Hudson; ‘but
suppose, Hemskirk, you should find some greasy Spaniard with earrings
and oily ringlets rifling your boxes, hauling out all the money you’ve
got, pocketing that fine silver-mounted meerschaum pipe of yours’----

‘I vould coot orff hiss head,’ answered the Dutchman, breathing hard.

‘Gentlemen, you are unnecessarily alarming the ladies,’ cried old
marline-spike from the head of the table.

‘I suppose there’s no lack of small-arms with you, captain?’ roared
the Colonel; ‘plenty for us here as well as for your men?’

‘I shall insist upon your not meddling, Edward, in whatever may
happen,’ cried his wife, giving him an emphatic nod over the edge of
her fan with her Roman nose.

‘I shall meddle, then, my dear,’ he shouted. ‘If it comes to those
rascals attacking us, I shall fight, as of course we all will,’ and
again he bent his little fiery eyes upon Mr. Johnson.

‘My note-book is ready, colonel,’ said Mr. Johnson pleasantly, with a
satirical grin at the peppery little soldier. ‘I’ll not lose sight of
you, sir.’

‘I believe you will then, sir,’ sneered the colonel, ‘unless Captain
Keeling takes the precaution to clap his hatches on to prevent anybody
skulking below from off the deck.’

‘Mere bluster is not going to help us,’ said Colledge, who disliked the
colonel; ‘no good in railing and storming like heroes in a blank-verse
performance for an hour at a time before falling to. If Captain Keeling
wants any assistance outside that of his crew, he may command me for
one.’

‘I wath never taught fenthing,’ said Mr. Fairthorne; ‘if I fight, it
mutht be with a muthket.’

‘If the ship should be captured, what’s to become of us?’ cried Mrs.
Hudson. ‘I’ve read the most barbarous histories about pirates. They
have no respect for sex or age; and it’s quite common, I’ve heard, for
every pirate to have twelve wives.’

Here Mrs. Trevor suddenly shrieked out for some one to bring her baby
to her, then went into hysterics, and was presently carried away in a
dead faint by the stewards, followed by her daughter, weeping bitterly.
Old Keeling whipped out an oath.

‘Now, gentlemen,’ he exclaimed, ‘you see what your conversation has
brought about. Ladies, I beg that you will not be uneasy. The stranger
will give us no trouble, I am persuaded;’ and rising with a look of
contempt, he bowed stiffly to Miss Temple and her aunt, and went on
deck.

I was too curious to observe what was going forward to linger in
the cuddy amid this idle rattle of tongues. Our ship having no
steerage-way, had slewed to the beat of the swell, and the brig was
now off the starboard bow, pretty much distant as she had been when
we went to lunch, but showing out with amazing clearness against the
sooty sky past her, upon which her topsails swung from side to side so
heavily that the lower yard-arms at times seemed to spear the water
lifting to them in hills. All over and beyond her lay a deep shadow of
thunder, a sky scowling to the zenith thick as though viewed through a
dust-storm, with a vision of the tufted cloud of the electric tempest
hovering here and there; but there was no lightning as yet, no echo of
distant grumbling; there was not a breath of air to cool the moistened
lip, and the noiseless heave of the swell was as though old ocean lay
breathing hard in a posture of dumb expectation.

Our crew hung about the decks in groups ready to spring to the first
command. Iron stanchions had been fitted into the line of the rails,
and boarding-nets triced up the length of the ship from just before the
fore-rigging to the poop rail. Aft was a small gang of seamen stationed
at each gun there, with all necessary machinery for the artillery at
hand. The captain, the chief mate, and Mr. Cocker stood abreast of
the wheel, looking at the brig with an occasional glance round the
sea at the weather. I stepped to the side to take another view of the
stranger, and I was noticing with admiration the toy-like beauty of her
as she soared with ruddy sheathing to the head of a swell, with now and
again a most delicate echo of the clapping and beating of her canvas
stealing to us through the dark, breathless atmosphere, when I was
accosted by some one at my elbow.

‘Do you think it possible, Mr. Dugdale, that if that vessel fired at
our ship she could hit us, so violently rolling as she is?’

I turned. It was Mrs. Radcliffe, and with her was Miss Temple. With the
exception of a ‘good morning’ or a ‘good night,’ I had never exchanged
a syllable with this lady in all the time she and I had been together
on shipboard. Her kind little face fluttered jerkily at me as she asked
the question in a manner to remind one of the movements of the head
of a hen. Miss Temple stood like a statue, swaying to the majestic
perpendicular of her figure upon the rolling deck without the least
visible effort to keep her balance, her dark and shining eyes fixed
upon the brig.

‘Her gunners,’ said I, ‘would need to be practised marksmen, I should
say, to hit us from such a tumbling platform as that yonder.’

‘Just my opinion, as I told you, Louise,’ she exclaimed.

‘If she were to begin to fire,’ exclaimed the girl, keeping her gaze
bent seawards, ‘she would be sure to hit us, though it were by chance.’

‘Very possibly,’ said I.

‘There will be some wind soon, I think, don’t you?’ said Mrs. Radcliffe.

‘I hope so,’ I answered.

‘In that case,’ said she, ‘we shall be able to sail away and escape,
shan’t we?’

‘She will chase us,’ exclaimed Miss Temple; ‘and as she sails faster
than we do, she will catch us!’

‘Now, is that likely?’ cried Mrs. Radcliffe, with a nervous toss of her
head at me.

‘Everything is possible at sea,’ said I, laughing; ‘but there is a
deal in our favour, Mrs. Radcliffe: first the weather, that as good
as disables that fellow at present anyway; then the coming on of the
night, with every prospect of losing the brig in the darkness.’

‘Would you advocate our running away from him?’ exclaimed Miss Temple,
looking at me with a fulness and firmness that was as embarrassing and
vexing in its way as an impertinent stare.

‘Oh, yes,’ said I; ‘certainly. We are a peaceful trader. It is our
business to arrive in India sound in body’----

‘I should consider,’ said she, gazing at me as if she would subdue me
into acquiescence in anything she chose to say by merely eyeing me
strenuously, ‘that Captain Keeling would be acting the part of a coward
if he ran away from that little vessel.’

‘Oh, Louise, how can you talk so!’ cried Mrs. Radcliffe, with a sort of
despairful toss of her hands.

‘I should like to see a fight between two ships,’ said the girl,
removing her overbearing eyes from my face to send them over the deck
amongst the groups of men. ‘Of course, if that vessel attacks us,
we ladies will be sent below to rend the cabin with our screams at
every broadside; but I, for one, am perfectly willing, if the captain
consents, to shoot at those people through a porthole.’

‘Oh, Louise, the whims which possess you are really dreadful!’ cried
Mrs. Radcliffe: ‘imagine, if you should even wound a man! it would
make you miserable for life; perhaps end in your becoming a Roman
Catholic and going into a convent. Think of that.’

Miss Temple looked at her aunt with a little curl of her lip.

‘I do not know,’ she exclaimed, ‘why it should be more dreadful in
a woman to defend her life than in a man. Nobody, I suppose, wishes
to hurt those people; but if they attempt to hurt us, why should we
women feel shocked at the notion of our helping the sailors to protect
the ship by any means in our power? I am like Mr. Fairthorne,’ she
continued, with a sarcastic glance at me; ‘I could not fight with a
sword, but I can certainly pull the trigger of a musket.’

‘It is really hardly lady-like, my dear,’ began Mrs. Radcliffe.

‘Nonsense, aunt! Lady-like! Is it more genteel to fall into hysterics
and swoon away, than to take aim at a wicked wretch who will have your
life if you don’t take his?’ and as she said this, she whipped a cotton
umbrella out of her aunt’s hand, and putting it to her shoulder, as
though it were a gun, levelled it at the brig.

Colledge, who was standing at a little distance away, talking to two
or three of the passengers, clapped his hands and laughed out. For
my part, I could not take my eyes off her, so fascinating were the
beauties of her fine form in that posture, her head drooped in the
attitude of the marksman, and her marble-like profile showing out clear
as a cutting in ivory against the soft shadowy mass of gloom of the sky
astern.

Mrs. Radcliffe again tossed her arms in a despairful gesture, with
a pecking, so to speak, of her face at the gangs of men on the
quarter-deck and waist; and then making a little flurried snatch at her
umbrella, she passed her arm through her niece’s, exclaiming: ‘Help me
to reach the cuddy, my dear. There’s a thunderstorm brewing, I’m sure,
and I’m afraid of lightning.’ She made me a little staggering curtsey,
and walked with Miss Temple to the companion, down which the pair of
them went, followed by Mr. Colledge, who I could hear complimenting
Miss Temple on her resolution to fight the enemy, if the stranger
should prove one.

A few minutes later Mr. Emmett and Mr. Johnson approached me, bumping
against each other like a brace of lighters in a seaway as they struck
out on the swaying deck with their staggering legs.

‘I say, Dugdale,’ cried the journalist, ‘shall you fight?’

‘Why, yes,’ I answered. ‘We shall all be expected to help the crew
certainly.’

‘I don’t see that!’ exclaimed Mr. Emmett, drawing his wide-awake down
to his nose and folding his arms with a tragic gesture upon his breast,
whilst he swung his figure from side to side on wide-stretched legs.
‘It’s all very fine to expect; but I agree with Johnson, whose argument
is, that we have paid our money to be transported in safety to Bombay;
and I cannot for the life of me see that the captain has any right to
look for cooperation at our hands, unless, indeed, he so contrives it
as to enable us to help him without imperilling our lives.’

‘But that fellow yonder may be full of ruffians, Emmett,’ said I; ‘and
if you do not help our sailors to defend the _Countess Ida_, they may
board us; and then they will cut your throat,’ I added, with a look at
his long neck, ‘which is no very agreeable sensation, I believe, and
an experience quite worth a pinch of heroism to evade.’

‘It’s a beastly business altogether,’ said he, wrinkling his nose as he
stared at the brig.

‘But why should they board us?’ exclaimed Mr. Johnson. ‘If they do, it
will be the captain’s fault. Why does he want to go on sticking _here_
for, as if, by George! we were a man-of-war with three decks bristling
with guns and crammed to suffocation with men?’

‘There is no wind,’ said I; ‘and without wind, Johnson, ships cannot
sail.’

‘Then why the confounded dickens don’t he lower all the boats,’ he
cried, ‘and fill them with sailors, and tug the ship out of sight of
that beast there?’

I laughed outright.

‘Well, I’m not in the habit of using strong language,’ said Mr.
Emmett, scowling at the brig; ‘but curse me if I’m going to fight. My
simple contention is, I’ve paid my money to be transported peacefully
to India; and,’ added he, with a glance aft at old Keeling, who was
staring up at the sky, as though to observe if there were any drift in
the vapour up there, ‘if he don’t fulfil his undertaking, I’ll sue him
or his owners for breach of contract.’

‘I’m no sailor,’ exclaimed Mr. Johnson, ‘but I may claim to have some
intelligence as a landsman, and my argument is,’ he cried, talking in a
loud voice, ‘that it is quite in Captain Keeling’s power to launch the
boats and drag the ship away from this spot. In an hour the brig would
be out of sight.’

At that instant there was a flash of lightning that made a crimson
dazzle of the dark heavens beyond the brig, where the sky sloped in a
horrible yellowish slate colour into the sooty thickness which circled
the horizon.

‘Ha!’ cried Mr. Emmett, ‘I don’t like lightning;’ and he abruptly
trundled down the poop ladder to the quarter-deck and disappeared.

‘Here’s a mess to be in!’ grumbled Johnson. ‘It’s all very well to
shoot or be shot at if you make butchery a profession. But to be maimed
or killed in some cheap affray--having to fight for people you don’t
care a hang about--obliged, for instance, to jeopardise your eyes,
your limbs, perhaps your very existence, for an old woman like Mrs.
Bannister, when the business is not in one’s line at all--’ He clenched
his fist, and fetching his thigh a whack with it, exclaimed: ‘Let
little hectoring Colonel Cock-a-doodle-doo cut as many throats as he
can come at--I am a man of peace. I have parted with a large sum to get
to India in comfort; and to expect me to help the sailors to fight is
as monstrous as to look to me to assist them in furling the sails and
scrubbing the decks.’

Thus speaking, he followed Mr. Emmett down on to the quarter-deck.




CHAPTER XII

A STORM OF WIND


The atmosphere now took a deeper tinge of gloom. Thunder had followed
the blaze of lightning in the west, low, distant, but continuous, like
a rapid succession of the batteries of several ships of war heard from
afar; and as the echoes of this ominous growling swept to our ears over
the glass-smooth heave of the swell, the fresh dye of gloom came into
the day and made an evening darkness of the afternoon.

The noise of the thunder had been like calling a hush upon the ship.
The men hung in silent groups along the decks; motionless at the wheel
was the tall form of a powerful sailor gripping the spokes with an iron
clutch that was scarcely to be shaken by the frequent hard drag of the
tiller-gear to the kick of the rudder; the seamen stationed at the
guns aft stood with folded arms or hands carelessly thrust into their
pockets gazing at the brig, or, with the impatient looks of sailors
kept idly waiting on deck during their watch below, directing glances
at the horizon or the sky, as though in search of some sign of wind.
The three mates continued to overhang the rail near the captain, who
walked the length of a plank to and fro with a telescope under his arm,
which he would sometimes level at the brig, afterwards addressing his
officers in a low voice.

All the ladies were below; but shortly after Mr. Johnson had left me,
Miss Temple came on deck and went to the side to look at the stranger,
and there lingered, with her gaze upon the western sky, over which the
lightning was now running in fluid lines, a cascading of fiery streaks
with a frequent dull opening blaze low down, which the heads of the
swell would catch and mirror as though it were an instant gleam of
sunset. Had she condescended to glance my way, I should have joined
her. She loitered a while, and then left the deck; and at the same
moment the second-mate came forward to the break of the poop and called
out an order for the foresail and mizzen topsail to be furled and the
foretopsail to be close reefed.

‘Very unpleasant state of suspense this,’ said little Mr. Saunders,
stealing to my side and looking up into my face.

‘Very,’ I answered; ‘but it seems as if the weather was to extinguish
our anxiety as regards the brig.’

‘Yes,’ said he. ‘I heard the captain tell Mr. Prance that he believes
there is a gale of wind behind that storm yonder. Gracious me! what a
very vivid flash. Hark! it nears us quickly.’

There was a rattling peal of thunder now, a long volleying roar of it,
and a few large drops of rain fell. Mr. Cocker stood at the rail with
a telescope in his hand. He busily watched the men up aloft, sometimes
letting fly an order to the boatswain in a voice that went past the
ear like a stone from a sling. A large drop of rain splashed upon Mr.
Saunders’s nose.

‘It’s about to burst, I think,’ said he, looking straight up into the
heavens with his modest yearning eyes. ‘I shall go below;’ and down
trotted the little creature.

‘Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘lend me your glass for an instant, will you?’ I
pointed it at the brig. ‘Yes,’ I exclaimed, talking to the second-mate
with the telescope at my eye; ‘I believe I was not mistaken. Full
of men, indeed! Phew! Why, there are hands enough upon her yards to
furnish out the complement of a fifty-gun frigate.’

It was indeed as I said. They were furling all canvas upon the
stranger, intending apparently to let her meet what was to come with a
small storm foretrysail, which I could see a crowd of seamen bending
and making ready for setting. Her fore and topsail yards were loaded
with men swarming like bees along the thin delicate lines of spars,
and even as I watched, the canvas they were rolling up melted away
into slender streaks of white. In the cross-trees of both masts, and
higher yet on the yards above, and in the tops also, were a number of
men busily employed in sending down the royal, skysail, and topgallant
yards and housing the topgallant masts. There looked to me to be at
least a hundred of a crew to the vessel.

You found something almost ghastly and absolutely startling in
the sharp distinctness of the little fabric rolling against the
thunder-black skies behind her, and upon the long, malignant,
greenish-hued swell in which the plunging lightning was sparkling as
though the water were crackling with phosphoric fires. Dark as the
atmosphere was with the deep shadow of storm, the brig stood out to the
eye visible to the minutest detail the sight could reach to, plunging
heavily under her naked spars, with her wet black sides darting out the
mirrored flame of the lightning flashes with as clear a dazzle as glass
or polished brass would throw.

‘The number of her crew witnesses to her character,’ said I, returning
the telescope to Mr. Cocker.

‘Oh, there is no doubt of her,’ he exclaimed; ‘the captain’s an old
hand, and twigged her speedily.’

‘The weather will put an end to her, I expect,’ said I. ‘Very lucky for
us, Mr. Cocker. A large crew of ruffians and six guns of a side, not to
mention a twenty-four pounder in the bows, and cutlasses and small arms
in galore, hardly form a joke. It is easy to figure the beauty, that
sails, I daresay, three feet to our one, quietly sheering alongside
and throwing seventy or eighty of her children aboard, dark-skinned
assassins, armed to the teeth, reeking of garlic. Well, hang me, Mr.
Cocker, if I didn’t believe that the times of those gentry had passed
some years ago.’

His lips were moving to answer me, but there was a wide and blinding
flash of lightning at that instant that set the heavens on fire,
immediately followed by a crash of thunder as deafening as though a
first-rate had blown up close aboard us. Yet again the scowl of the
clouds deepened in darkness, and the brig grew vague on a sudden in the
gloom of the storm.

‘There comes the rain!’ cried Mr. Cocker, pointing to a line of greyish
shadow with a look of steam boiling up as it were from the base of it.
It drew creeping slowly on to the brig, and its perpendicular fall made
one think of it as of a vast sheet of water up above overflowing and
cataracting sheer down over the edge of a cloud.

‘There is no wind there,’ said I; ‘it is a regular Irishman’s
hurricane, right up and down. But here goes for a waterproof.’

I trundled below for a suit of rubber clothes, being too anxious to
observe what was to happen to choose to leave the deck. All the
passengers were congregated in the cuddy, and the lightning, as it
glittered in the port-holes and skylights, flashed up their faces in
the gloomy atmosphere, making them look a pale and trembling crowd. The
colonel was pacing the deck near the piano. Miss Hudson leaned against
her mother with her hands over her eyes. If ever there came a brighter
flash than usual, one lady or another would scream. Colledge and Miss
Temple sat over a draught-board; but I could not gather, from the
hurried glance I threw over the people as I passed through them, that
they were playing. I equipped myself from head to foot in waterproofs
and came again into the saloon on my way to the poop.

‘Are you going on deck, Dugdale?’ cried Mr. Johnson, shouting aloud,
to render his voice audible above the continuous cannonading of the
thunder.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘You will be struck dead, sir,’ called out Mrs. Hudson.

‘I have half a mind to join you,’ said Mr. Emmett, jumping up with a
wild look at the skylight: ‘it’s simply beastly down here.’

‘Hark to that!’ bawled the colonel; ‘there’s a shower for you!’

The wall of rain had reached us. For a minute before it struck the ship
you could hear it hissing upon the sea like twenty locomotives blowing
off steam; then plump! came the cataract on to our decks. Had every
drop been a brick, the noise could not have been more astounding. One
couldn’t hear the thunder for the roaring of the fall of water and
hailstones, though the deep and awful note of the electric storm was
in it to add to its tremendous sound. The darkness was now so heavy
in the cuddy, that in the intervals of the lightning the faces of the
people were scarce distinguishable. Amid the distracting noises of
the thunder, of the breathless storm of hail and rain, of the water
cascading off the decks overboard in a furious gushing and seething,
arose the chorus of a number of seamen on the quarter-deck hauling upon
the maintopsail halliards there, with the piercing chirruping of the
boatswain’s pipe and hoarse orders delivered overhead from the poop.

‘Where’s the steward?’ bawled the colonel in his loudest tones.
‘Confound it, are we to be left in total blackness here? Why don’t
some one light the lamps?’

‘Are you coming on deck, Mr. Emmett?’ I cried; but he had sunk back
on his seat with his arms folded and his head bowed; and obtaining no
reply, I walked to the companion steps, receiving, as I passed Miss
Temple, a half interrogative glance from her, which made me look again
in readiness to answer the question that seemed to hover on her lips.
But her eyes instantly dropped, and the next instant she had turned to
say something to her aunt, who was on a sofa behind her; so, rounding
on my heel, up I went into the smoking wet.

There was nothing to be seen but rain--such a sheet of it as one
must explore the latitudes we were in to parallel. The lightning
flashed amidst it incessantly, and every line of the falling water
sparkled like glowing wire in dazzling hues of crimson and of violet
alternating. I waited under the shelter of the companion cover till the
first weight of all this rain and hail should have passed. Through the
haze of moisture that rose like steam off the decks to the cataractal
swamping I could discern the figure of old Keeling looking like a
soaked scarecrow, the fine-weather hat upon his head reduced to pulp
and hanging about his ears like a rotten fig. The fellow at the wheel
stood like a statue amid the drenching downpour; but the men who had
been stationed at the guns were gone.

I had not been a minute in the hatchway when the heavens seemed to be
split open to the very heart of their depths by a flash of lightning,
followed in the space of the beat of a heart by a shock of thunder that
seemed to happen immediately over our mastheads--a most soul-subduing
crash, if ever there was one! and as if by magic, the rain ceased,
and the atmosphere sensibly brightened. There was a great noise of
shrieking in the cuddy, and half blinded, and pretty handsomely dazed
by that terrible blast of lightning and the thunder-clap which had
followed, I crept down the steps with my pulse beating hard in my ears
to see what had happened, scarce knowing but that some one had been
struck and perhaps killed.

‘What is it?’ I shouted to the colonel, who stood at the foot of the
ladder.

‘Only Mrs. Hudson in hysterics,’ he roared; on hearing which I went up
again, being in no temper to make one of the nervous company below.

The swell had flattened; all to starboard there was an oozing as of
daylight into the breathless thickness, with ugly hump-shaped masses
of black vapour defining themselves up in the ugly sallow smother in a
sort of writhing way, as though they were coming together in a jumble;
but to port it was as black as thunder, an inky slope hoary with rain,
with lightning spitting and zigzagging all over it. I went to the rail,
where stood Mr. Cocker with his clothes full of water.

‘A pretty little shower!’ said I.

‘Very,’ he answered, with his face showing of a bleached look like the
flesh of a washerwoman’s hand. ‘A plague on this sort of work, say I!
This serge shrinks consumedly when drenched, and my trousers will be up
to my knees to-morrow morning--three pounds ten as good as washed out
of a man’s pocket.’

‘Where’s your glass, Mr. Cocker?’

‘In that hencoop there,’ said he.

I pulled out and directed it at the dim blotch of brig that had caught
my eye stealing out of the wet dusk like the phantom of a ship.

‘By my great-grandfather’s wig!’ cried I with a start. ‘So! no fear
_now_ of being boarded. Our windpipes are safe for the present. Look
for yourself, Mr. Cocker.’

He ogled her an instant, then bawled to the skipper, who was speaking
to Mr. Prance.

‘The brig’s been struck, sir! Her mainmast is over the side.’

In very truth it was as he declared. I whipped the glass out of his
hand for another look, and, sure enough, could clearly distinguish
a whole lumber of wreckage lifting to the roll of the subdued swell
alongside the swaying hull of the brig. Her foremast and topmast stood
intact to the cross-trees, but abaft she was as completely denuded as
if a chopper had been laid to the foot of the mast. The mess is not to
be described. I could make out that a length of her bulwark was crushed
flat, and the black lines of shrouds and gear went snaking overboard
like so many serpents wriggling out of the hatches into the water. But
the gloom was too deep to suffer me to see what her people were doing.

I went to the companion way and called down to Colonel Bannister.

‘Halloa? What now? Who wants _me_?’ he shouted.

‘Tell the ladies, colonel,’ I sung down, ‘that the brig has been struck
by lightning, and that our safety, so far as _she_ is concerned, is
assured.’

I heard him roar out the news as I went to the side again, and a moment
after up rushed the whole body of passengers to see for themselves.
The decks were full of water, but nobody seemed to mind that. The
ladies came splashing through it to the rail, some of them taking
terrified peeps at the mass of winking blackness settling away down in
the east, and dodging the play of lightning, as it were, with a sort
of involuntary ducking of their heads and lifting of their fingers to
their eyes.

Old Keeling cried out: ‘Ladies, be good enough to take my advice and
return to the cabin. We shall be having a strong blow of wind coming
along in a few minutes.’

‘Gott, she iss on fire!’ here shouted Hemskirk, pointing directly at
the brig with a fat forefinger, whilst with the other hand he kept a
binocular glass glued to his eyes.

‘Is it so then, sir!’ cried Mr. Prance to the skipper; ‘there is smoke
rising from her fore-hatch.’

Mr. Cocker had replaced his telescope in the hencoop; I jumped for
it, and in a trice had the lenses bearing upon the brig. There was an
appearance of smoke, a thin bluish haze of it, as though mounting from
a newly kindled bonfire, slowly going spirally into the motionless air;
but almost at the instant of my first looking I thought I could witness
something of a ruddy tinge flashing for a breath into this smoke, as
if to a sudden leap of flame. Though the brig lay at the same distance
that had separated her from us throughout the afternoon, the shrouded
and heaped-up vaporous wall of firmament beyond her seemed to heave her
as close again to us as she really was; and now quite easily by the aid
of the glass I could see her decks as she rolled them our way dark with
her people, many of them hacking and hewing at her rigging, as though
to clear away the wreckage; others seemingly passing buckets along;
others, again, running wildly and as it might seem aimlessly about,
whilst with the regularity of a swing in action the beautifully moulded
hull rolled quietly from side to side with a rhythmic oscillation
of her one mast upon which the fragment of white trysail filled and
hollowed as it beat the air, starting out upon the eye with a very
ghastliness of pallor as it swelled to its cotton-like hue out of the
shadow of its incurving, and hovered like some butterfly over the
hideous dusky green of the swell.

I replaced the telescope.

‘Here comes the wind!’ I heard Mr. Cocker sing out.

‘Ladies,’ cried old Keeling, ‘let me beg of you to step below.’

Most of them complied, but a few lingered, staring with curiosity at
the coming weather. I watched it with amazement, for never before had I
seen a storm of wind coming down upon a ship in a sort of wall. One saw
the line of it in a ridge of foam whose extremities were lost in the
gloom on either hand. It was of a glass-like smoothness all in front
of it, and not a breath of air was to be felt when the stormy hissing
of it was loud in our ears as it came sweeping up, the clouds on high
darting to right and left, and a paler faintness, as of increasing
daylight, coming into the air along with it. The bull-like notes of Mr.
Prance rang from the poop through the ship.

‘Stand by maintopsail halliards--foretopsail sheets--foretopmast
staysail down-haul.’

The wind struck the brig. My eye was upon her, and she disappeared in
the shrieking whirl of flying spume as you extinguish a reflection in
a mirror by breathing upon the glass. A minute later it was upon us.
It smote the Indiaman right abeam, and down she lay in a seething and
hissing flatness of boiling waters, stooping yet and yet, till the line
of the topgallant bulwark rail looked to be flush with the furious
yeasty smother. There were two men at the helm holding the wheel jammed
hard over. I swung to a belaying pin on the weather rail, and the poop
deck went down from me to leeward at an angle that made one’s eyes
reel in the head to look along it. There was a true hurricane note in
the bellowing of the wind on high under the rush and disparting of the
maddened clouds, and the first flash of it between our masts was as
the passage of a score of locomotives racing by at express speed and
shrieking as they went.

I was waiting to see what the ship meant to do, when the weather
maintopsail sheet parted, though a treble-reefed sail, with a sound
like another clap of thunder, and in a moment the canvas was flogging
away from the yard in ribands, with Mr. Cocker shouting at the top
of his voice, and a crowd of seamen tumbling and capsizing about the
main deck to the officer’s orders to haul upon the clewlines. It was
at that instant, amidst all this prodigious hallabaloo, that I caught
sight of Miss Temple to leeward of the mizzen mast holding on to some
gear that was belayed at the foot of the mast. As my gaze rested on
her, the rope she grasped either overhauled itself or was detached from
the pin, and she swung out to leeward. There were hencoops and rails
and the mizzen shrouds to save her from going overboard; but there was
nothing to prevent her from breaking a limb, or even her neck, if she
let go. Though my legs yet preserved something of their old seafaring
nimbleness, the slope of the deck made desperate work for them. Yet
the girl must be reached, and at once. She did not appear to have
sense enough to lower herself down the rope till her feet touched, in
which posture she might have hung with safety. She maintained her first
clutch of the gear, and swung above the deck to the height of some two,
perhaps three feet. Keeling, who was clinging to the weather vang, did
not seem to see her. The helmsmen grinding at the wheel heeded nothing
but their business. Mr. Prance and the second officer clawing at the
brass rail at the break of the poop, leaned to windward, with their
eyes on the streaming rags of the maintopsail shouting commands.

There was only one means of arriving at the girl with any approach to
swiftness. I dropped on to the deck, and went down upon my knees with
my head to windward, and worked my way stern first in that attitude
to the line of lee hencoops, along which I made shift to travel half
jammed by my own weight against the bars of the coops, until, coming
abreast of the girl, I got upon my legs, and firmly planting my left
foot against the bottom of the row of boxes in which the fowls were
immured, and leaning on my right leg in a fencing posture, I put my
arms round her waist and told her to let go. She did so at once, as
likely as not because she could hold on no longer. The weight of her
noble figure was rather more than I had bargained for. I had thought to
hold her fairly off the deck and ease her away, whilst in my arms, down
to the hencoop behind, on which she could sit; but she was too much for
me. I was forced to let her feet touch the planks, where, losing her
balance, she threw her arm round my neck to save herself from falling.
The next moment I was lodged upon the hencoop, she on my knee, and her
arms still enclosing my head; but this was only for a breath or two.
It was easy to lift her to my side, and there she sat, her fine face
dark with blushes, and her eyes sparkling with alarm and confusion and
twenty other passions and emotions, whilst the curve of her bosom rose
and fell with hysteric swiftness.

‘What a very ridiculous position! It serves me right. I should have
taken the captain’s advice. I should have gone below.’

This was all my haughty companion condescended to say. Not a syllable
of thanks--not a glance of softness to reward me! However, to be
reasonable, she could have scarcely been audible had she attempted
more words. Even to catch the few sentences she uttered I had to
strain my ear to the movement of her lips, off which the wind clipped
her speech with a silencing yell.

There had been but little in the thunder of the storm, which still
showed livid over the eastern horizon, that surpassed the wild and
prodigious roaring of this first outfly of the hurricane. The ship
continued to lie down to the fierce sweep of the wind at the angle she
had reached to--it was as good or bad, indeed, as being on her beam
ends--and Miss Temple and I were forced to keep our seats upon the
hencoop, no more able to crawl up the deck to where the companion hatch
was than had it been a slope of polished ice. This maybe was what she
meant by ‘the ridiculousness of her position.’ The captain, standing to
windward, was sending ominous looks at the band of the foretopsail and
at the foretopmaststay-sail, the cloths of which continued miraculously
to hold. There was too much wind for the sea to rise suddenly; indeed,
the weight of the blast had smoothed down what remains of swell the
rain and hail had left; the ocean was a level surface of foam, out of
which the tempest of wind was tearing up whole snowstorms of flakes
of spume, which flew over the ship in clouds that whitened out into a
sort of dazzle, as though sun touched, as they flew in their throbbing
masses athwart the leaden sky which poured across the sea over the
ship’s bows in rags and trailing lengths and gyrating coils of sooty
vapour.

‘Look!’ I shouted to Miss Temple, and pointed over our stern, where,
out of the flying faintness and thickness of spray, the figure of the
brig was at that instant forming itself.

I sprang upon the hencoop, the better to see, grasping the mizzen
shrouds for support.

‘Shall I give you a hoist?’ I cried to the girl.

Her curiosity was too strong; the flying brig--a fleeting vision of the
object which had filled us with alarm and suspense throughout the day,
was a wonder to be witnessed at such a time as that at any cost. Her
lips parted in the word yes to the howl of the gale, and in a moment I
had her up alongside of me, my arm through hers, securely gripping and
supporting her, and the pair of us gazing breathlessly at the sight
astern.

With her single mast rising to the topmast cross-trees, the yards
square, the remains of the trysail streaming like white hair from gaff
and boltrope, the brig swept under our stern, shooting sheer athwart,
seething smoothly as a sleigh over a level plain of snow, and rushing
before the wind straight as the flight of an arrow. A coil of thick
black smoke, whose base was reddened by sudden tongues of fire, blew
over her bow, and coloured the atmosphere into which she rushed with a
complexion of thunder. It seemed to rise from the fore-hatch, and it
fled straight off the deck. I caught a sight of crowds of men forward
and aft, with a couple of fellows leaping into the fore-rigging as the
brig rushed by, to gesticulate to us. But the vision came and went in
a few breaths like an object seen by lightning. So dense was the gale
with spray, that there was scarcely a cable’s length of opening round
about us. The brig showed and was gone! a phantasm, with the white
waters pouring over her spritsail yard as she rushed through it, and no
more of her was to be noted by the eye during the headlong swiftness of
her plunge from one wall of spindrift into another, than the delicate
lines of her rigging supporting the foremast, the bowsprit vanishing
in a cloud of smoke, blowing ahead of her, a length of white deck, a
flash of skylight glass, the glimmer, so to speak, of some score of
faces turned our way.

‘She is on fire,’ I cried in Miss Temple’s ear: ‘she carries a doomed
crew into that thickness!’

She moved, as if to resume her seat, and very carefully I got her on to
the hencoop again.

But the first terrific spite of the gale was now gone, and the squab
form of the Indiaman lifting a little out of the seething cauldron in
which she lay with her main-deck rail flush with the yeasty surface,
was beginning slowly to pay off. Her decks gradually grew level, and
presently she was right before the wind, with the howl of it at her
taffrail, and her huge bows heaping up the white sea till the leaps of
the summits were at either cathead.

Mr. Colledge’s face showed in the companion-way.

‘Oh, there you are, Miss Temple!’ he roared. ‘Mrs. Radcliffe is firmly
persuaded you have been blown overboard.’

She rose, but sat again, for the wind was too strong for her. Friend
Colledge himself seemed pinned by the weight of it in the hatch.

‘We may be able to manage it between us,’ I shouted; and passing my arm
through hers, I drove the pair of us to windward, and got her on to the
companion ladder, down which she went.




CHAPTER XIII

FIRE!


It blew fiercely all that night. A mountainous sea was rolling two
hours after the first of the gale, amid which the _Countess Ida_ lay
hove-to under a small storm trysail, making very heavy weather of
it indeed. There was a deal to talk about, but no opportunity for
conversing. Few were present at the dinner-table, though the sea then
running was moderate in comparison with the sickening heights to which
it swelled later on; and there was little more to be done throughout
the meal than to hold on for dear life, to keep a keen weather-eye
lifting upon one’s food, and to gaze speechlessly across the table at
one another amid an uproar of howling hurricane, of roaring waters, of
straining bulkheads, of a ceaseless clattering of crockery and other
noisy articles, that rendered conversation sheerly impossible.

And you may add to all this a good deal of consternation amongst us
passengers. I had seen some weather in my time, but never the like of
such a tossing and plunging bout as this. There were moments, indeed,
when one felt it high time to go to prayers: I mean when the ship would
lie down on the slant of some prodigious surge until she was hanging by
her keel off the slope with her broadside upon the water, as though it
were the bottom of her. There were many heave-overs of this sort, every
one of which was accompanied by half-stifled shrieks from the cabins,
by the sounds of the crash of boxes, unlashed articles, chairs, movable
commodities of all kinds rushing with lightning-speed to leeward.
Heavy contributions had been made upon our nervous systems by the
incidents of the day: the vicinity of the brig--the prospect of having
our windpipes slit--the furious thunderstorm--the spectacle of the
lightning-struck craft: and the stock of fortitude left amongst us was
but slender for a manly and courageous encounter of such an experience
as this night was to prove.

I vividly recall the appearance of the cuddy at eleven o’clock when
the hurricane was nearing its height. The ship was hove-to on the
starboard tack, and the lamps in the saloon would sometimes swing over
to larboard till their globes appeared to rest against the upper deck.
I had managed in some sort of parrot fashion to claw along the table to
abreast of a swinging tray, where I mixed myself a glass of cold brandy
grog, with which I slided down to a sofa on the lee-side; and there I
sat looking up at the people to windward as at a row of figures in a
gallery.

Heaven knows I was but little disposed to mirth; yet for the life of me
I could not refrain from laughter at the miserable appearance presented
by most of my fellow-passengers there assembled. Near to the cuddy
front, on the windward seats, sat Mr. Johnson, with terror very visibly
working in his white countenance. His eyes rolled frightfully to every
unusually heavy stoop of the ship, and his long lean frame writhed in
a manner ludicrous to see, in his efforts to keep himself from darting
forwards. Near him was Mr. Emmett, who strove to hold himself propped
by thrusting at the cushions with his hands, and forking out his legs
like a pair of open compasses with the toes stuck into the carpet on
the deck, as though he was a ballet dancer about to attempt a pirouette
on those extremities. Little Mr. Saunders, who had thoughtlessly taken
a seat on the weather side, sat with his short shanks swinging high off
the deck in the last agonies, as one could see, of holding on. My eye
was on him when he slided off the cushion to one of those dizzy heaves
of the ship which might have made any man believe she was capsizing. He
shot off the smooth leather like a bolt discharged from a cross-bow,
and striking the deck, rolled over and over in the manner of a boy
coming down a hill. There was nothing to arrest him; he passed under
the table and arrived half-dead within a fathom of me; on which I edged
along to his little figure and picked him up. He was not hurt, but was
terribly frightened.

‘What shocking weather, to be sure!’ was all he said.

I put my glass of grog into the worthy little creature’s hand, and he
thanked me with one of his long-faced, wistful looks, then applied the
tumbler to his mouth and emptied it.

But to end all this: at three o’clock in the morning there was a
sensible decrease in the gale. I had fallen asleep in the cuddy, and
waking at that hour, and finding but one lamp dimly burning, and the
interior deserted, I worked my way to the hatch, groped along to my
cabin, and tumbled into my bunk, where I slept soundly till half-past
eight. The sun was shining when I opened my eyes: the ship was plunging
and rolling, but easily, and in a floating, launching manner, that
proved her to be sailing along with the wind aft. Colledge was seated
in his bunk with his legs over the edge, gazing at me meditatively.

‘Awake?’ he exclaimed.

‘Yes,’ said I.

‘Fine weather this morning, Dugdale. But preserve us, what a night
we’ve come through, hey? D’ye remember talking of the _fun_ of a
voyage? Yesterday was a humorous time certainly.’

I sprang out of bed. ‘Patience, my friend, patience!’ said I; ‘this
trip will end, like everything else in our world.’

‘Ay, at the bottom of the sea, for all one is to know,’ he grumbled. ‘A
rod of land before twenty thousand acres of shipboard, say I. By the
way, you and Miss Temple looked very happy in each other’s company when
I peeped out of the hatch yesterday to see what had become of her, at
her aunt’s request.’

‘You should have risen through the deck a little earlier,’ said I. ‘Yon
would have found her hanging.’

‘Hanging!’ he cried.

‘Oh, not by the neck,’ said I.

‘What did you do?’

‘I rescued her. I seized her by the waist and bore her gloriously to a
hencoop.’

‘Did you put your arms round her waist?’ said he, staring at me.

‘I did,’ I exclaimed.

He looked a little gloomy. Then brightening in a fitful kind of way, he
said: ‘Well, I suppose you _had_ to do it--a case of pure necessity,
Dugdale?’

I closed one eye and smiled at him.

‘She’s a very fine woman,’ said he, gazing at me gloomily again. ‘I
trust you have not been indiscreet enough to tell her that I am engaged
to be married?’

‘Oh now, my dear Colledge, _don’t_ let us trifle--_don’t_ let us
trifle!’ said I. ‘Scarcely have you escaped the risk of being boarded
by pirates--the chance of being beheaded by some giant picaroon--of
being struck dead by lightning--of foundering in this ship in the
small-hours, when round with circus speed sweep your thoughts to the
ladies again, and your mouth is filled with impassioned questions.
Where’s your gratitude for these hairbreadth escapes?’ and being by
this time in trim for my morning bath, I bolted out of the cabin,
laughing loudly, and deaf to his shout of, ‘I say, though, _did_ you
tell her that I was engaged?’

The ocean was a very grand sight. The wind still blew fresh, but as
the ship was running with it, it seemed to come without much weight.
The sea was flowing in long tall surges of an amazing richness and
brilliance of blue, and far and near their foaming heads flashed out
to the sunshine in a splendour of whiteness that contrasted most
gloriously with the long dark slopes of unbroken water. From sea-line
to sea-line the sky was overspread with clouds of majestic bulk and
grandeur of swelling form, as white in parts as the foam which broke
under them, and with many rainbows in their skirts, and a tender
violet shading in the centre of them, that gave them as they soared
above the horizon the look of brushing the very heads of the coursing
seas. The Indiaman was thundering through it under whole topsails and
topgallant-sails, rolling with the stateliness of a line-of-battle ship
as she went, with a rhythmically recurring stoop of her ponderous bows
till the water boiled to the line of her forecastle rail, and her deck
forward looked to lie as flat as a spoon in the dazzling smother.

I saw Mr. Prance on the poop, and having had my bath, stepped aft to
exchange a greeting with him.

‘The ship appears to have come safely out of last night’s mess,’ said I.

‘It was a real breeze,’ he answered; ‘nothing suffered but the
maintopsail. The _Countess Ida’s_ a proper ship, Mr. Dugdale. Those who
put her together made all allowances, even for her rats. There’s some
craft I know would have strained themselves into mere baskets in last
night’s popple. But there was not an inch more of water this morning in
the _Countess’s_ well than will drain into her in twenty-four hours in
a river.’

‘And the brig, Mr. Prance? I believe I and Miss Temple were the two
who saw the last of her.’

‘No. Captain Keeling spied her as she swept under our stern,’ said he.
‘She was on fire; and by this time, I reckon her beautiful hull--and
truly beautiful it was, Mr. Dugdale--will be represented somewhere
around us here by a few charred fragments.’

‘Or,’ said I, ‘even supposing they managed to extinguish the fire, Mr.
Prance, her one mast with most of its heavy hamper aloft was not going
to stand the hurricane very long. So she’ll either be a few blackened
staves, as you say, or a sheer hulk. And her people?’

‘Ah,’ exclaimed the chief mate, fetching a deep breath, ‘from eighty to
a hundred of them I allow. There’s no boat put together by mortal hands
could have lived last night. By heavens though, but it is enough to
make a harlequin thoughtful to figure such a ship-load of souls as that
brig carried hurried into mere carcases for the deep-sea dab to smell
to and the wall-eyed cod of the Atlantic to nibble at.’

‘Now, honestly, Mr. Prance--do you really believe there was anything of
the pirate about that brig?’

‘Honestly, Mr. Dugdale, I do, sir; and I haven’t a shadow of a doubt
that if the weather had taken any other turn, if a sailing breeze had
sprung up, or the water had held smooth enough for a boating excursion,
her people would have put us to our trumps with a good chance of their
crippling us and plundering us, to say no more.’

Here the breakfast bell rang, and I rushed to the cabin to complete my
toilet for the table.

There was no lack of talk this morning when the passengers had taken
their places. The anxieties of the preceding day and night seemed only
to have deepened the purple hue of old Keeling’s countenance, and his
face showed like the north-west moon in a mist betwixt the tall points
of his shirt collars, as he turned his skewered form from side to side
answering questions, smirking to congratulations, and bowing to the
‘Good-morning, captain,’ showered upon him by the ladies. Mr. Johnson
came to the table with a black eye, and Dr. Hemmeridge’s forehead
was neatly inlaid with an immense strip of his own sticking-plaster,
the effect in both cases of the gentlemen having fallen out of their
bunks in the night. Colonel Bannister had sprained a wrist, and the
pain made him unusually vindictive and aggressive in his remarks. The
weather had not apparently served the ladies very kindly. Mrs. Hudson
presented herself with her wig slightly awry, and her daughter looked
as if she had not been to bed for a week. It was hard to realise,
in fact, that the pale spiritless young lady with heavy violet eyes
looking languidly through their long lashes, which deepened yet the
dark shadow in the hollows under them, was the golden, flashful,
laughing, coquettish young creature of the preceding morning.

I had made sure of a bow at least from Miss Temple; but I never once
caught so much as a glance from her. Yet she was very easy and smiling
in her occasional conversation with Colledge across the table. She
alone of the women seemed to have suffered nothing from the violent
usage of the night that was gone. In faultlessness of appearance, so
far as her hair and attire and the like went, she might have stepped
from her bedroom ashore after a couple of hours spent with her maid
before a looking-glass. Not even a look for me, thought I! not even one
of those cold swiftly fading smiles with which she would receive the
greeting of a neighbour or a sentence from the captain!

I was stupid enough to feel piqued--to suffer from a fit of bad temper,
in short, which came very near to landing me in an ugly quarrel with
Mr. Johnson.

‘D’ye know, I rather wish _now_,’ said this journalist, addressing
us generally at one end of the table, but with an air of caution, as
though he did not desire the colonel to hear him, ‘that that brig
yesterday _had_ attacked us. It would have furnished me with an
opportunity for a very remarkable sea-description.’

‘Tut!’ said I, with a sneer; ‘before a man can describe he must see;
and what would _you_ have seen?’

‘Seen, sir?’ he cried; ‘why, everything that might have happened, sir.’

‘Amongst the rats perhaps down in the hold. Nothing more to be seen
_there_, unless it’s bilgewater.’

‘Goot!’ cried Mynheer Hemskirk. ‘It vould hov been vonny to combare
Meester Shonson’s description mit der reeality.’

‘I will ask you not to question my courage,’ said Mr. Johnson, looking
at me with a face whose paleness was not a little accentuated by his
black eye. ‘I believe when it came to the scratch I should be found as
good as another. _You_ would have fought, of course,’ he added, with a
sarcastic sneer at me.

‘Yes; I would have fought then, just as I am ready to fight now,’ said
I, looking at him.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ exclaimed Mr. Prance, in a subdued reprimanding
voice, ‘the ladies will be hearing you in a minute.’

‘You have been a sailor, Dugdale, you know,’ remarked Mr. Emmett in
a satirical tone, ‘and might, therefore, have guessed yesterday that
either the brig was a harmless trader, or that, supposing her to have
been of a piratical nature, she would not attack us.’

‘And what then?’ cried I, eyeing him hotly.

‘Well,’ said he, with a foolish grin, ‘of course, under those
circumstances, a large character for heroism might be earned very
cheaply indeed.’

Johnson lay back in his chair to deliver himself of a noisy laugh.
His seat was a fixed revolving contrivance, and its one socketed leg
might have been injured during the night. Be this as it may, on the
journalist flinging himself back with a loud applauding ‘Ha! ha!’ of
his friend Emmett’s satiric hit at me, the chair broke, and backward
he went with it with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other.
Old Keeling started to his feet; the stewards came in a rush to the
prostrate man. Those ladies who were near gathered their gowns about
them as they watched him plunging in his efforts to extricate himself
from the chair, in which his hips were in some manner jammed. For my
part, having breakfasted, and being half suffocated with laughter,
I was glad enough to run away out on deck. Indeed, the disaster had
cooled my temper, and this occurrence was something to be thankful for,
since one thing was leading to another, and, for all one could tell,
the journalist and I might have come to blows as we sat side by side.

He and Emmett cut me for the rest of the day. My own temper was sulky
for the most part. I spent the whole of the morning on the forecastle,
smoking pipe after pipe in the ‘eyes’ of the ship, yarning in a
fragmentary way with the boatswain, who invented excuses to come into
the ‘head’ to indulge in a brief chat with me, whilst by his postures
and motions he contrived to wear an air of business to the gaze that
might be watching from the poop.

I would not own to myself that the sullen cast of my temper that
day was due to Miss Temple; but secretly I was quite conscious that
my mood was owing to her, and the mere perception of this was a new
vexation to me. For what was this young lady to me? What could signify
her coolness, her insolence, her cold and cutting disregard of me? We
had barely exchanged a dozen words since we left the Thames. Though
my admiration of her fine figure, her haughty face, her dark, tragic,
passionate eyes was extravagantly great, it was hidden; she had not
divined it; and she was therefore without the influence over my moods
and emotions which she might have possessed had I known that she was
conscious how deeply she fascinated me. She would not even give me
a chance to thoroughly dislike her. The heart cannot steer a middle
course with such a woman as she. Had her behaviour enabled me to hate
her, I should have felt easy; but her conduct was of the marble-like
quality of her features, hard and polished, and too slippery for the
passions to set a footing upon. ‘Pshaw!’ thought I again and again,
as I viciously hammered the ashes out of the bowl of my pipe on the
forecastle rail, ‘am not I an idiot to be thinking of yonder woman in
this fashion, musing upon her, speculating about her--a person who is
absolutely as much a stranger to me as any fine lady driving past me in
a London Park!’ Yet would I repeatedly catch myself stealing peeps at
her from under the arch of the courses, hidden as I was right forward
in the ship’s bows, while she was pacing the length of the poop with
Mr. Colledge, or standing awhile to hold a conversation with her aunt
and Captain Keeling, the nobility of her figure and the chilling lofty
dignity of her bearing distinctly visible to me all that way off, and
strongly defining her amongst the rest of the people who wavered and
straggled about the deck.

The wind lightened towards noon; the fine sailing breeze failed us, and
sank into a small air off the larboard beam; the swell of the sea went
down, but the colour of the brine was still the same rich sparkling
blue of the early morning. I had never seen so deeply pure and
beautiful a tint in the ocean in these parallels. It made one think of
the Cape Horn latitudes, with the white sun wheeling low, and a gleam
of ice in the distant sapphire south. The great masses of cream-soft
rainbow-tinctured cloud melted out, and at two o’clock in the afternoon
it was a true equinoctial day, and the Indiaman a hot tropic picture,
awnings spread, the pitch softening betwixt the seams, a sort of bluish
steamy haze lazily floating off the line of her bulwark rail, through
which the dim sea-limit showed in a sultry sinuous horizon. The ship
rippled through it, clothed to her trucks with cloths that shone with
the silver whiteness of stars to the hot noontide effulgence. The ayahs
lolled about the quarter-deck, and John Chinaman sat upon a carronade
fretting the baby he held into squeals of laughter and temper by
tossing to. The old sow grunted with a grave grubbing noise under the
long-boat, and fore and aft every cock in the ship was swelling his
throat with defiant fine-weather crowings.

It was somewhere about three bells that evening--half-past seven
o’clock--that I was standing with Mr. Prance at the brass rail that
protected the break of the poop, the pair of us leaning upon it,
watching a grinning hairy fellow capering in a hornpipe a little abaft
the stowed anchor on the forecastle. The one-eyed ape which we had
rescued, and which by this time was grown a favourite amongst the
seamen, sat low in the foreshrouds, watching the dancing sailor--an odd
bit of colour for the picture of the fore-part of the ship, clothed
as he was in a red jacket and a cap like an inverted flower-pot, the
tassel of it drooping to his empty socket. It was a most perfect
ocean evening, the west glowing gloriously with a scarlet sunset,
the sea tenderly heaving, a soft warm breathing of air holding the
lighter sails aloft quiet. All the passengers were on deck saving
Miss Temple, who was playing the piano to herself in the cuddy. In
the recess just under me were three or four smokers; and the voice of
Mr. Hodder waxing warm in some argument with Mynheer Peter Hemskirk,
entered with unpleasant disturbing emphasis into the tender concert of
sounds produced by the fiddlers forward, the occasional laughter of
the seamen, the tinkling in the saloon, the voices of the ladies aft,
the gentle rippling of water alongside, combining, and softened by
distance and the vastness amid which the ship floated, into a sort of
music.

I was in the midst of a pleasant yarn with Mr. Prance, whilst we
hung over the rail, half watching the jigging chap forward, and
half listening to each other. He was recounting some of his early
experiences at sea, with a hint in his manner of lapsing anon into a
sentimental mood on his lighting upon the name of a girl whom he had
been betrothed to.

All on a sudden the music forward ceased. The fiddler that was working
away upon the booms jumped up and peered downwards in the posture of a
man snuffling up some strange smell. The fellow who was dancing came to
a halt and looked too, walking to the forecastle edge and inclining his
ear towards the fore-hatch, as it seemed. He stared round to the crowd
of his shipmates who had been watching him, and said something, and a
body of them came to where he was and stood gazing. The weather clew of
the mainsail being lifted, all that happened forward lay plain in sight
to those who were aft.

‘What is wrong there?’ exclaimed Mr. Prance abruptly, breaking off
from what he was saying, and sending one of his falcon looks at the
forecastle. ‘The pose of that fiddling chap might make one believe he
was tasting cholera somewhere about.’

A boatswain’s mate came down the forecastle ladder and went to the
fore-hatch, where he paused. Then, with a glance aft, he came right
along to the quarter-deck with hurried steps, and mounted the poop
ladder, coming to a stand when his head was on a level with the upper
deck.

‘What is it?’ cried Mr. Prance.

The fellow answered in a low voice, audible only to the chief officer
and myself: ‘There’s a smell of fire forwards, sir, and a sound as of
some one knocking inside of the hatch.’

‘A smell of fire!’ ejaculated the mate; and swiftly, though preserving
his quiet bearing, he descended to the quarter-deck and walked forward.

I had long ago made myself free of all parts of the ship, and guessed,
therefore, that, my following in the wake of the mate would attract
no attention, nor give significance to a business which might prove
a false alarm. By the time he had reached the hatch, I was at his
side. The boatswain and sailmaker came out of their cabins, a number
of seamen quitted the forecastle to join us, and the rest gathered
at the edge of the raised deck, looking down. The fore-hatch was a
great square protected by a cover that was to be lifted in pieces. A
tarpaulin was stretched over it with battening irons to keep it fixed,
for this was a hatch there was seldom or never any occasion to enter at
sea, the cargo in all probability coming flush to it.

I had scarcely stood a moment in the atmosphere of this hatch, when I
became sensible of a faint smell as of burning, yet too subtle to be
detected by a nostril that was not particularly keen. As I was sniffing
to make sure, there came a hollow, dull noise of knocking, distinct,
and unmistakably produced by some one immediately under the hatch
striking at it with a heavy instrument. Mr. Prance hung in the wind for
a second or two snuffling and hearkening with the countenance of one
who discredits his senses.

‘Why’ he exclaimed, ‘there _is_ somebody below, and--and’---- Here he
sniffed up hard with much too much energy, methought, to enable him
to taste the faint fumes. ‘Carpenter,’ he exclaimed to the withered
old Scotchman who made one of the crowd of onlookers, ‘get this hatch
stripped and the cover lifted--quickly, but _quietly_, if you please.’

He looked sternly round upon the men; and then sent a hurried glance
aft, where stood Captain Keeling in the spot we had just vacated, with
Mrs. Radcliffe on his arm.

The battens were nimbly drawn, the tarpaulin thrown aside, and some
seamen stooped to raise the hatch cover. A few seconds were expended in
prising and manœuvring, in the midst of which the knocking was repeated
with a note of violence in it, accompanied by a general start and a
growl of wonder from all hands.

‘Heave!’ cried the carpenter, and up came the cover, followed by a
small cloud of blue smoke, and immediately after by the figure of
the hideous sailor Crabb, who sprang from off the top of a layer of
white-wood cases with a loud curse and a horrible fit of coughing.




CHAPTER XIV

CRABB


The atmosphere was still red with the sunset, though the luminary
was below the horizon, and there was plenty of light to see by. An
extraordinary shout went up from amongst the men at the sight of Crabb,
as he leapt out of the hatch in the heart of the little cloud of smoke.
Those who were on the side of the deck on to which he jumped recoiled
with a positive roar of horror and fright, one or two of them capsizing
and rolling over and over away from the hatch, as though they were in
too great a hurry to escape to find time to get upon their legs.

I very well remember feeling the blood desert my cheek, whilst my heart
seemed to come to a stand, and my breathing grow difficult at the
apparition of the fellow. _Crabb!_ Why, I had _seen_ him lying dead in
his bunk! I had heard of him as lying stitched up in a hammock on this
very fore-hatch! I had beheld that same hammock flash overboard, and I
had watched it lifting and frisking away astern! Who, then, was yonder
hideous creature that had jumped in hobgoblin fashion out of the hold?
Could he be the buried Crabb himself?

There is no lack of things to frighten people withal in this world; but
I cannot conceive of any shock comparable to the instant consternation
felt by a man who meets another of whose death he is profoundly
assured, and whom he has been thinking of as a corpse, dead and buried,
for any number of days gone by. The general horror, the prodigious
universal amazement which held the mate and me and others amongst us
speechless and motionless, as though we had been blasted and withered
up by some electric bolt from heaven, scarcely endured a minute; yet
by that handful of seconds was the picture of this amazing incident
framed. I see Crabb now as he let fall his arm from his face when his
fit of choking coughing ceased: and I recall the blind wild look of his
distorted eyes, as he slowly turned his countenance round, as though
the mild evening light was violently oppressive to his vision after
the days of blackness passed in the hold. His repulsive countenance
was dark with dirt and grime. I observed many scratches upon his
arms, which were naked to the elbows, as though he were fresh from
squeezing and boring through some ugly jagged intricacies of stowed
commodities. His shirt hung in rags upon him; there were many rents in
his loose trousers; and there was blood upon his exposed chest, from
a wound seemingly made by the sharp head of a nail or some edge of
iron-sheathed case.

‘Seize that man, bo’sun,’ suddenly roared Mr. Prance, leaping out of
his benumbed condition of astonishment in a way to make one think of a
bull sweeping out through a hedge: ‘handcuff him, and shut him up in
your berth for the present. Get the head-pump rigged--the hose passed
along. Jump for buckets, and stand by to pass them down.’

The powerful hand of the boatswain closed like a vice upon Crabb’s
neck. I thought to see a struggle, but the ugly sailor seemed weak
and dazed, and stepped passively to the boatswain’s berth into which
my friend shot him, following and closing the door, to conceal, I
suppose, the operation of manacling the man from the eyes of the
half-stupefied Jacks.

Half-stupefied, I say: but the orders of the mate were like the
flourish of some magic wand over each man. There was a headlong rush,
though with something of discipline in the hurry of it too, at the
chief officer’s command. Smoke was draining through the open hatch,
floating up thinly and lazily, though it was a thing to make one
hold one’s breath, not knowing but that the next vomit might prove a
thicker, darker coil, with a lightning-like reddening of the base of
it to the flicker of some deep down tongue of flame. Fire at sea! Ah,
great God! Out of the mere thought of it will come the spirit of the
fleetest runner into the laziest and most lifeless shanks.

The mate sprang on top of the cases stowed level with the lower edges
of the hold with a cry for men to follow him. The interior was the
fore-part of the ’tween decks, bulkheaded off some little distance
before the mainmast, and filled with light, easily handled goods. The
hatch conducting to the ship’s hold lay closed immediately under these
few tons of freight in a line with the yawning square into which Mr.
Prance had sprung. Where was the fire? If in the lower hold, then
heaven help us! I glanced aft, and saw the captain hastily walking
forward. The passengers had come together in a crowd, and were staring
with pale faces from the head of the poop ladder. Old Keeling was
perfectly cool. He asked no questions, made no fuss, simply came to the
side of the hatch, saw Mr. Prance and a gang of men at work breaking
out the cargo, and stood watching, never hindering the people’s labour
by a question. His keen seawardly eye took in everything in a breath.
One needed but to watch his face to see _that_. The placidity of the
fine old fellow was a magnificent influence. In an incredibly short
space of time, the captain meanwhile never once opening his lips, the
head-pump was rigged, the hose trailed along and pointed ready, a
number of seamen were standing in files with buckets ranged along all
prepared for drawing water, and passing it to the hatchway with the
swiftest expedition. I cannot express the wonderful encouragement the
heart found in this silence alone. The captain trusted his chief mate,
saw that he exactly knew what to do, and stood by as a spectator, with
just one look of approval at his quiet, resolute, deep-breathing ranks
of seamen awaiting orders.

Once he turned his purple face, and observing Mr. Johnson and Mr.
Emmett and one or two others nervously edging their way forwards, he
beckoned with a long forefinger to a boatswain’s mate and said in a low
voice: ‘Drive those gentlemen aft on to the poop, and see that none of
the passengers leaves it.’ He glanced at me once, but said nothing,
possibly because he had found me looking on when he arrived.

All as tranquilly as though the job was no more than the mere breaking
out of a few boxes of passengers’ luggage, the work of removing the
cargo so as to get at the fire proceeded. The smoke continued to steal
stealthily up. The contents of the cases I do not know, but they
were light enough to be lifted easily. A number of them were got on
deck. The mate and Mr. Cocker--who had arrived from his cabin shortly
after the captain had come--headed the gang of workers, and rapidly
disappeared in the lanes they opened.

‘Here it is!’ at last came a muffled shout.

Mr. Cocker coming out of a dark hole like a rat, with the perspiration
streaming from him as though a bucket of oil had been capsized over his
head, sang out for the hose to be overhauled and the pump to be worked.

‘Have you discovered the fire, sir?’ said the captain, calling down to
him in such a collected voice as he would have used in requesting a
passenger to take wine with him.

‘Yes, sir. It is a small affair. The hose will suffice, I think, sir.’

An instant after, the clanking of the plied pump was to be heard along
with the sound of water steadily gushing, followed by a cloud of steam,
which quickly vanished. A quarter of an hour later the mate came up
black as a chimney-sweep. He touched his cap to the captain, and simply
said: ‘the fire’s out, sir.’

‘What was it, Mr. Prance?’

‘A bale of blankets, sir.’

‘Can you guess how it originated?’

‘I expect that the man Crabb----’ began the mate.

The captain started and stared.

‘The man Crabb,’ continued Mr. Prance, ‘whom we imagined dead and
buried, sir, has been skulking in the hold’--old Keeling frowned with
amazement--‘and I have no doubt he fired the bale whilst lighting his
pipe.’

‘Crabb in the hold!’ cried the skipper; ‘do you speak of the man whom
we buried, sir?’

‘The same, sir,’ answered Mr. Prance.

Old Keeling gazed about him with a gaping face. ‘But he died, sir, and
was buried,’ he exclaimed. ‘I read the funeral service over him, and
saw, sir--Mr. Prance, I _saw_ with my own eyes the hammock fall from
the grating after it had been tilted.’

The chief officer said something in reply which I did not catch,
owing to the noise amongst the men who were yet in the hold and the
talk of the sailors round about. He then walked to the boatswain’s
berth followed by the captain, that old marline-spike’s eyes might
bear witness to the assurance that the Crabb who had leapt up out of
the fore-hatch in a smother of smoke was the same Crabb who had been
solemnly interred over the ship’s side some weeks before.

Mr. Cocker came wriggling out of the hold and got on to the deck
alongside of me to superintend the restowal of the broken-out goods.

‘Is the fire out?’ I asked.

‘Black out,’ he answered. ‘It was no fire, to speak truly of it, Mr.
Dugdale. A top bale of blankets or some such stuff was smouldering in
about the circle of a five-shilling piece--a little ring eating slowly
inwards, but throwing out smoke enough to furnish forth a volcano for
a stage-scene. A beastly smell! not to speak of some of the stuff down
there being as blackening as a shoe-polisher’s brushes.’ Here he looked
at the palms of his hands, which were only a little more grimy than his
face.--‘But what’s this I hear about Crabb? Has the dead sailor come to
life again?’

‘He’s yonder,’ said I, nodding towards the boatswain’s berth, which
the captain and mate had entered, closing the door after them: ‘you’ll
need to see to believe. Time was that when a man was dropped over a
ship’s side with a cannon-ball at his feet he was as dead as if his
brains were out. D’ye remember, Mr. Cocker, how that hammock went
floating astern, as if there were less than a dead sailor in it, though
something more than nothing? There’s been some devilish stealthy
scheme here depend upon it. We may yet find out that the ship wasn’t
scuttled because the ugly rogue hadn’t time to pierce through the lower
hatch before he set the vessel on fire.’

‘But he was a dead man, sir; Hemmeridge saw him dead,’ cried Cocker,
eyeing me with an inimitable air of astonishment.

‘Ay,’ said I, ‘dead as the bones of a mummy. But he’s _there_ all the
same,’ I added pointing to the forecastle cabin, ‘as alive as you or I,
and capable, I daresay, of kicking after a little.’

At this moment the mate put his head out of the boatswain’s berth and
called to Mr. Cocker, on which I walked leisurely aft, with amazement
in me growing, and scarcely capable of realising the truth of what I
had seen.

The passengers were still crowding the fore-part of the poop, peering
and eagerly talking, but in subdued voices, with Colonel Bannister
moving angrily amongst them, and the boatswain’s mate sentinelling the
foot of the ladder.

‘Oh, Mr. Dugdale,’ cried Mrs. Radcliffe, leaning over the rail and
crying down her question with a pecking motion of her head; ‘is the
fire out, do you know? Are we safe?’

‘The fire _is_ out, madam,’ I replied, lifting my hat; ‘and the ship
is as safe this minute as ever she was in the Thames. Captain Keeling
will, I have no doubt, be here very shortly to reassure you.’

Miss Temple, towering half a head above her aunt, looked down at
me with an air of imperious questioning in her face. There was a
hot scarlet blush all along the west, yet with power enough in
its illumination to render each face of the crowd above quite
distinguishable against the tender shadow stealing from the east
into the air, and I could see an eagerness in the girl’s full, dark,
glowing, and steadfast gaze to warrant me the honour of a conversation
with her if I chose to ascend the ladder. But just then Hemmeridge came
out of the cuddy on to the quarter-deck with the hint of a stagger in
his walk. His eyes showed that he was only just awake, and his hair
that he had run out of his cabin in a hurry.

‘I say, Dugdale,’ he exclaimed, ‘what’s been the matter, hey? Fire, is
it? And the steward tells me that Crabb has come back. Has the man gone
mad?’

‘There’s been a fire,’ said I, ‘and Crabb has come back.’

Here Cocker came along the deck.

‘Doctor, the captain wants you.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Come along; I’ll take you to him,’ said the second mate, running his
eye over Hemmeridge’s figure with a half-look on at me full of meaning
in it.

They walked forward, the doctor a trifle unsteady in his gait, I
thought.

I went to my berth for some tobacco; I stayed a short time below, and
when I returned, the last scar of sunset was gone. The west was a
liquid violet darkness trembling with stars, and the ship was floating
through the darkness of the night, which in these latitudes follows
swiftly upon the heels of the departing day. Captain Keeling had come
aft, and was standing in the midst of a crowd of passengers answering
questions, and soothing the women, who were snapping inquiries in
whole volleys, their voices threaded by tremors and shrill with
nerves. Mr. Prance, who had found time to cleanse himself, was on
deck in charge of the ship. All was hushed forwards. Against the stars
twinkling over the line of the forecastle rail under the foot of the
foresail, that slowly lifted and fell to the heave of the ship. I
could distinguish the outlines of sailors moving here and there in
twos and threes. A subdued hoarse prowling of voices came out of the
block of darkness round about the galley and the long-boat, where were
gathered a number of men, doubtlessly discoursing on the marvellous
incident of the evening. The glittering brilliants in the sky winked
like dewdrops along the black edge of the spars and at the extremity
of the yard-arms; and spite of the voices of the people aft and of the
mutterings forward, so deep was the ocean hush up aloft that again and
again the sound of the delicate night-breeze, breathing lightly into
the visionary spaces of the sails, would fall like a sigh upon the ear.

‘An exciting piece of work, Mr. Prance,’ said I, stepping to his side,
‘taking it from the start to the close.’

‘Why, yes,’ he answered. ‘The passengers will not be wanting in
experiences to relate when they get ashore. Enough has happened
yesterday and to-day, in the way of excitement, I mean, to last out an
ordinary voyage, though it were as long as one of Captain Cook’s.’

‘What has Hemmeridge to say about this business of Crabb, do you know?’
I asked.

‘You will keep the news to yourself, if you please,’ he answered; ‘but
I don’t mind telling _you_ that he’s under arrest--that is to say, he
has to consider himself so.’

‘What for?’ I asked, greatly astonished.

‘Why, Mr. Dugdale,’ said he, slowly looking round, to make sure that
the coast was clear, ‘you may easily guess that this business of the
scoundrel Crabb--an old pirate, as I remember telling you, signifies a
very deep-laid plot, an atrociously ingenious conspiracy.’

‘I supposed that at once,’ said I.

‘The fellow Crabb feigned to be dead,’ he continued. ‘A sham it must
have been, otherwise he wouldn’t be in irons yonder. Now, are we to
believe that Hemmeridge can’t distinguish between death and life? He
reports the man dead to the captain. The fellow is stitched up; but,
as we have since ascertained, a prepared hammock is substituted for
the one that conceals his remains, and we bury maybe some clump of
wood. This is the part Captain Keeling least likes, I think. He is a
pious old gentleman, and his horror when’---- He checked himself with
a cough, and a sound on top of it like a smothered laugh, as though he
enjoyed some fancy in his mind, but durst not be too candid, since it
was the captain he talked about.

‘It is assumed,’ said I, ‘that Hemmeridge represented Crabb as dead
knowing him to be alive?’ He nodded. ‘What will have been the project?’
I continued, shaping out the truth as, bit by bit, it formed itself
in my head. ‘Robbery, of course. Ay, Mr. Prance, that will have been
it. Crabb is to be smuggled into the hold, the notion throughout the
ship being that he is dead and overboard; and when in the hold’---- I
stopped.

‘Well,’ said he with a shrug of his shoulders, ‘there’s the mail-room.
What else? With a parcel of diamonds in it worth seventy thousand
pounds, not to speak of money, jewelry, and other precious matters.’

‘By heavens! did any man ever hear the like of such a plot?’ cried I;
‘and Hemmeridge is suspected as a confederate?’

‘We shall see, we shall see,’ he answered.

‘Just tell me this, Mr. Prance,’ I exclaimed, thirsty with curiosity,
‘who are the others involved? Somebody must have shifted Crabb’s
remains.’

‘The sailmaker is in irons,’ said he.

‘Yes! I might have sworn it! Why is it that the high Roman nose of that
chap has haunted my recollection of the ghastly appearance Mr. Crabb
presented at every recurrence of my mind to the loathsome picture?’

He slightly started, and I could see him eyeing me earnestly.

‘By the way,’ he exclaimed, ‘now that I think of it, Hemmeridge showed
Crabb’s body to _you_, didn’t he?’

‘Certainly he did,’ I responded.

‘Well, it will give the doctor a chance,’ said he, as though thinking
aloud; and so saying he made some steps in the direction of the
captain, and I went down on the quarter-deck to blow a cloud and muse
upon the matters he had filled my mind with.


END OF THE FIRST VOLUME


  _Spottiswoode & Co. Printers, New-street Square, London._




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of My Shipmate Louise, Volume 1 (of 3), by 
William Clark Russell

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 62343 ***