CHAPTER XXVII

‘THE BASHFUL MAID’

If Captain George kept a log, as is probable, or Eugène Beaudésir a diary, as is possible, I have no intention of copying it. In the history of individuals, as of nations, the exception is Stir, the rule Stagnation. There are long links in the Silver Cord, smooth, polished, uniform, one exactly like the other, ere its sameness is varied by the carving of a boss or the flash of a gem. It is only here and there that life-like figures and spirit-stirring scenes start from the dead surface of the Golden Bowl. Perhaps, when both are broken, neither brilliancy nor workmanship, but sterling worth of metal, shall constitute the true value of each.

‘The Bashful Maid’ found her share of favouring winds and baffling breezes; trim and weatherly, she made the best of them all. Her crew, as they gained confidence in their skipper and became well acquainted amongst themselves, worked her to perfection. In squally weather, she had the great advantage of being over-manned, and could therefore carry the broadest surface of canvas it was possible to show. After a few stormy nights all shook into their places, and every man found himself told off to the duty he was best able to perform. The late Captain of Musketeers had the knack of selecting men, and of making them obey him. His last-joined hands were perhaps the best of his whole ship’s company. Bottle-Jack became boatswain’s mate, Smoke-Jack gunner, and Slap-jack captain of the foretop. These three were still fast friends and sworn adherents of Beaudésir. The latter, though he had no ostensible rank or office, seemed, next to the skipper himself, the most influential and the most useful person on board. He soon picked up enough knowledge of navigation to bring his mathematical acquirements into play. He kept the accounts of stores and cargo. He possessed a slight knowledge of medicine and surgery. He played the violin with a taste and feeling that enchanted the Spaniard, his only rival in this accomplishment, and caused many a stout heart to thrill with unaccustomed thoughts of green nooks and leafy copses, of laughing children and cottage-gardens, and summer evenings at home; lastly, the three Jacks, his fast friends, found him an apt pupil in lessons relating to sheets and tacks, blocks and braces, yards and spars, in fine, all the practical mysteries of seamanship.

During stirring times, such as the first half of the eighteenth century, a brigantine like ‘The Bashful Maid,’ well-armed, well-manned, commanded by a young adventurous captain having letters of marque in his cabin, and no certain knowledge that peace had yet been proclaimed with Spain, was not likely long to preserve her sails unbleached by use nor the paint and varnish undimmed on her hull. Not many months elapsed ere she was very different in appearance from the yacht-like craft that ran past the Needles, carrying Eugène Beaudésir prone and helpless as a log in her after-cabin. He could scarcely believe himself the same man when, bronzed, robust, and vigorous, feeling every inch a sailor, he paced her deck under the glowing stars and the mellow moonlight of the tropics. Gales had been weathered since then, shots fired, prizes taken, and that career of adventure embarked on which possesses so strange a fascination for the majority of mankind, partly, I think, from its permanent uncertainty, partly from its pandering to their self-esteem. A few more swoops, another prize or two taken, pillaged, but suffered to proceed if not worth towing into port, and the cruise would have been so successful, that already the men were calculating their share of profit and talking as if their eventual return to Britain was no longer a wild impossibility. Everything, too, had as yet been done according to fair usage of war. No piracy, no cruelty, nothing that could justify a British three-decker in capturing the brigantine, to impress her crew and hang her captain at his own yard-arm. Eugène’s counsels had so far prevailed with George that he had resolved on confining himself to the legitimate profits of a privateer, and not overstepping the narrow line of demarcation that distinguished him from a pirate.

While, however, some of her crew had been killed and some wounded, ‘The Bashful Maid’ herself had by no means emerged scatheless from her encounters. Eugène was foolish enough to experience a thrill of pride while he marked the grim holes, planked and caulked, in her sides; the workmanlike splicing of such yards and spars as had not suffered too severely for repair, and the carefully-mended foresail, now white and weather-bleached, save where the breadths of darker, newer canvas betrayed it had been riddled by round-shot.

But soon his impressionable temperament, catching the influence of the hour, threw off its warlike thoughts and abandoned itself to those gentler associations that could hardly fail to be in the ascendant.

The night was such as is only to be seen in the tropics. Above, like golden lamps, the stars were flaming rather than twinkling in the sky; while low down on the horizon a broad moon, rising from the sea, spread a lustrous path along the gently-heaving waves to the very ship’s side; a path on which myriads of glittering fairies seem to dance and revel, and disappear in changing sparkles of light.

Through all this blaze of beauty, the brigantine glided smoothly and steadily on her course. For several days and nights not a sail had been altered, not a rope shifted, before that soft and balmy breeze. The men had nothing to do but tell each other interminable yarns and smoke. It was the fair side of the medal, the bloom on the fruit, the smooth of the profession, this enchanted voyage over an enchanted sea.

Eugène revelled in its charm, but with his enjoyment was mingled that quiet melancholy so intimately associated with all beauty in those hearts (and how many of them are there!) which treasure up an impossible longing, a dream that can never come to pass. It is a morbid sentiment, no doubt, which can thus extract from the loveliest scenes of nature, and even from the brightest triumphs of art, a strange wild ecstasy of pain, possessing a fascination of its own; but it is a sentiment to which the most generous and the most noble minds are peculiarly susceptible; a sentiment that in itself denotes excessive capability, for the happiness denied or withheld. Were it better for them to be of duller spirit and coarser fibre, callous to the spur, unequal to the effort? Who knows? I think Beaudésir would not willingly have parted with the sensibility from which he experienced so much pain, from the memories on which, at moments like these, under a moonlit sky, he brooded and dwelt so fondly, yet so despondently, to have obtained in exchange the inexhaustible good-humour of Slap-Jack or the imperturbable self-command of Captain George.

Immersed in his own thoughts, he did not observe the latter leave his cabin, walk from sheer habit to the binnacle in order to satisfy himself the brigantine was lying her course, and glance over the side to measure her speed through the water, and he started when the Captain placed his hand familiarly on his shoulder, and jeered him good-humouredly for his preoccupation. These men, whose acquaintance had commenced with important benefits conferred and received on both sides, were now thrown together by circumstances which brought out the finer qualities of both. They had learned thoroughly to depend on each other, and had become fast friends. Perhaps their strongest link was the dissimilarity of their characters. To Beaudésir’s romantic and impressionable temperament there had been, from the first, something very imposing in the vigorous and manly nature of Captain George, and the influence of the latter became stronger day by day, when he proved himself as calm, courageous, and capable on the deck of a privateer as he had appeared in his quarters at Paris, commanding a company of the Royal Guards.

For George, again, with his frank, soldier-like manner and somewhat abrupt address, which seemed impatient of anything like delicacy or over-refinement, there was, nevertheless, an unspeakable charm in his friend’s half-languid, half-fiery, and wholly romantic disposition, redeemed by a courage no danger could shake, and an address with his weapons few men could withstand. The Captain was not demonstrative, far from it, and would have been ashamed to confess how much he valued the society of that pale, studious, effeminate youth, in looks, in manner, in simplicity of thought so much younger than his actual years; who was so often lost in vague day-dreams, and loved to follow up such wild and speculative trains of thought; but who could point the brigantine’s bow-chasers more accurately than the gunner himself; who had learned how to hand, reef, and steer before he had been six weeks on board.

Their alliance was the natural consequence of companionship between two natures of the same material, so to speak, but of different fabric. Their respective intellects represented the masculine and feminine types. Each supplying that which the other wanted, they amalgamated accordingly. Beaudésir looked up to the Musketeer as his ideal of perfection in manhood; Captain George loved Eugène as a brother, and trusted him without reserve.

It was pleasant after the turmoil and excitement of the last few weeks to walk the deck in that balmy region under a serene and moonlit sky, letting their thoughts wander freely to scenes so different on far-distant shores, while they talked of France, and Paris, and Versailles, and a thousand topics all connected with dry land. But Eugène, though he listened with interest, and never seemed tired of confidences relating to his companion’s own family and previous life, frankly and freely imparted, refrained from such confessions in return, and George was still as ignorant of his friend’s antecedents as on that memorable day when the pale, dark youth accompanied Bras-de-Fer to their Captain’s quarters, to be entered on the roll of the Grey Musketeers, after running poor Flanconnade through the body. That they had once belonged to this famous _corps d’élite_ neither of them seemed likely to forget. Its merits and its services formed the one staple subject of discourse when all else failed. As in his quarters at Paris he had kept the model of a similar brigantine for his own private solace, so now, in the cabin of ‘The Bashful Maid,’ the skipper treasured up with the greatest care, in a stout sea-chest, a handsome full-dress uniform, covered with velvet and embroidery, flaunting with grey ribbons, and having a coating of thin paper over its silver lace.

There was one topic of conversation, however, on which these young men had never yet embarked, and this is the more surprising, considering their age and the habits of those warriors amongst whom they were so proud to have been numbered. This forbidden subject was the charm of the other sex, and it was perhaps because each felt himself so constituted as to be keenly alive to its power that neither ventured an allusion to the great influence by which, during the first half of life, men’s fortunes, characters, happiness, and eventual destiny, are more or less affected. It required a fair breeze, a summer sea, and a moonlight night in the tropics to elicit their opinions on such matters, and the manly, rough-spoken skipper was the first to broach a theme that had been already well-nigh exhausted by the watch on deck—gathered on the forecastle in tranquil enjoyment of a cool, serene air and a welcome interval of repose.

Old Turenne’s system of tactics had been declared exploded; the Duke of Marlborough’s character criticised; Cavalli’s last opera canvassed and condemned. Captain George took two turns of the deck in silence, stopped short at the taffrail, and looked thoughtfully over the stern—

“What is to be the end of it?” he asked abruptly. “More fighting, of course! More prizes, more doubloons, and then? After all, I believe there are things to make a man’s life happier than even such a brigantine as this.”

“There is heaven on earth, and there is heaven above,” answered the other, in his dreamy, half-earnest, half-speculative way; “and some men, not always the hardest-hearted nor the most vicious, are to be shut out of both. Calvin is a disheartening casuist, but I believe Calvin is right!”

“Steady there!” replied George. “Nothing shall make me believe but that a brave man can sail what course he will, provided his charts are trustworthy and he steers by them. Nothing is _impossible_, Eugène. If I had thought that I should have lost heart long ago.”

“And then?” asked Beaudésir, sadly.

“And then,” repeated the Captain, with a shudder, “I might have become a brute rather than a man. Do you remember the British schooner we retook from those Portuguese rovers, and the _mustee_,[3] who commanded them? I tell you I _hate_ to think it possible, and yet I believe a man utterly without hope might come to be such a wretch as that!”

“_You_ never would,” said Beaudésir, “and _I_ never should; I _know_ it. Even hope may be dispensed with if memory remains. My pity is for those who have neither.”

“I could not live without hope,” resumed the Captain, cheerily. “I own I do hope most sincerely, at some future time, for a calmer and happier lot than this; a lot that would also make the happiness of another; and that other so gentle, so trusting, and so true!”

Eugène looked in his face surprised. Then he smiled brightly, and laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“It will come!” he exclaimed; “never doubt it for a moment. It will come! do you remember what I said to you of my skill in fortune-telling? I repeat, success is written in your face. What you really wish and strive to attain is as sure to arrive at last as a fair wind in the trades or a flood-tide at full moon.”

“I hope so,” returned the Captain; “I believe it. I suppose I am as bold as my neighbours, and luckily it never comes across me when there’s anything to do; but sometimes my heart fails when I think, if I _should_ go down and lose my number, how she’ll sit and wonder, poor thing, why I never come back!”

“Courage, my Captain!” said Eugène, cheerily, affecting the tone and manner of their old corps. “Courage. _En arant! à la Mousquetaire!_ You will lose nothing, not even the cargo; we shall return with both pockets full of money. You will buy a _château_. There will be a fête at your wedding: I shall bring there my violin, and, believe me, I shall rejoice in your happiness as if it were my own.”

“She is so young, so beautiful, so gentle,” continued the Captain; “I could not bear that her life should be darkened, whatever comes of me. If, at last, the great happiness _does_ arrive, Eugène, I shall not forget my friend. _Château_ or cottage, you will be welcome with your violin. You would admire her as I do; we both think alike on so many subjects. So young, so fresh, so beautiful! I wish you could see her. I am not sure but that you _have_ seen her. Do you remember the day―?”

What further confidences the skipper was about to impart were here cut short by a round of applause from the forecastle, apparently arising from some proposal much approved by the whole assemblage. The Captain, with his friend, paused to listen. It was a request that Bottle-Jack would sing, and seemed not unfavourably received by that veteran. After many excuses, and much of a mock modesty to be observed under similar conditions in the most refined societies, he took his quid from his cheek, and cleared his voice with great pomp ere he embarked on a ditty of which the subject conveyed a delicate compliment to the proclivities of his friend Smoke-Jack, who had originated the call, and which he sang in that flat, monotonous, and dispiriting key, only to be accomplished, I firmly believe, by an able seaman in the daily exercise of his profession. He designated it “The Real Trinidado,” and it ran as follows:—

“Oh! when I was a lad, Says my crusty old dad, Says he,—‘Jack! you must stick to the spade, oh!” But he grudged me my prog, And he grudged me my grog, And my pipe of the real Trinidado.

“Says my Syousan to me,— ‘Jack, if you goes to sea, I’ll be left but a desolate maid, oh!’ Then I answers her—‘Sue! Can’t I come back to you When I’m done with the old Trinidado?”

“So to sea we clears out, And the ship’s head, no doubt, Sou’-west and by sou’ it was laid, oh! For the isles of the sun, Where there’s fiddlers and fun, And no end of the real Trinidado.

“Says our skipper, says he, ‘Be she close-hauled or free, She’d behave herself in a tornado!’ So he handles the ship With a canful of flip, And a pipe of the real Trinidado.

“She’s a weatherly craft, Werry wet, fore-and-aft, And she rolls like a liquorish jade, oh! But she steers werry kind, On a course to her mind, When she’s bound for the isle Trinidado.

“Soon a sail we espies, Says the skipper—‘My eyes! That’s the stuff for us lads of the trade, oh! Bales of silk in his hold, Casks of rum—maybe gold— Not forgetting the real Trinidado!’

“Then it’s ‘Stand by! My sons! Steady! Run out your guns— We’ve the Don’s weather-gage. Who’s afraid, oh!’ So we takes him aback, He is ours in a crack, And we scuttles him off Trinidado!

“Now, here’s to the crew! And the skipper! and Sue! And here’s ‘Luck to the boys of the blade, oh! May they ne’er want a glass, A fair wind, a fair lass! Nor a pipe of the real Trinidado!’”

The applause elicited by this effort was loud and long. Ere it subsided, George looked more than once anxiously to windward. Then he went to his cabin and consulted the barometer, after which he reappeared on deck and whispered in Eugène’s ear—

“I am going to caulk it for an hour or two. Hold on, unless there’s any change in the weather, and be sure you come below and rouse me out at eight bells.”