CHAPTER XXII.

FOUR BELLS IN THE DOG-WATCH.

All the next day there blew a gale, and Captain Phillips, anxious to make the most of it, as the wind was fair, squared his yards, with all that he dared to spread upon them. So sharp was the aforesaid gale, that on a taut bowline, no vessel could have shown more than a single sail, perhaps; but the _Hermione_ tore on before the hurrying blast, with her fore and main courses bellying out before it, and her three topsails set with a single reef in each.

Ere long, Captain Phillips was heard to shout:

"Away aloft, men--shake the reefs out of the topsails--masthead the yards."

Cheerfully enough the watch sprang aloft and obeyed the order. And now the foam flew in white sheets over her sharp bows, rolling aft to the break of the quarter-deck, from whence it surged forward again, and gurgled through the scuppers on each side alternately.

Astern a tremendous sea kept rolling after her, for waves and wind and all were with her now, and she sped before them at the rate of eleven knots an hour; thus it required all the strength of Pedro Barradas and of Noah Gawthrop, who volunteered for it, to hold the wheel, and steer her steadily.

Inspirited by the speed with which his brave ship tore along through foam and spray, Captain Phillips walked briskly to and fro, with his hands thrust into the pockets of his glazed storm-jacket, a gutta-percha speaking-trumpet under one arm, and his jolly red face shining with pleasure and drops of spray, as he glanced alternately aloft, over the quarter, or at Mr. Quail, who smiled approvingly.

"Hurrah, old ship!" said he; "now she goes through it! now she walks along with a will. She smells the Mauritius already, I think."

"The Bird Islands, or the Mozambique, more likely," muttered Pedro to Noah.

"What the devil have we to do with either one or the other?" asked Noah, with sulky suspicion.

"There she goes!" continued the captain; "and on she shall crack as long as her sticks hold together. Mr. Quail, get preventer-braces reeved; ship tackles on the backstays, haul all taut, and belay."

All day the gale held on thus, and about nightfall, when it began to abate into a steady breeze, in which the swinging booms of the lower studding-sails dipped at times like birds' wings in the brine, the _Hermione_ must have run more than 120 miles, and she was about that distance off the most southern portion of the coast of Natal.

How often had Captain Phillips and Mr. Basset wished to be fairly round the Cape of Good Hope--to have doubled it, though it was far away from dear old England; yet it was a necessary feature or point to be achieved in the voyage. They were fairly round the great Cape of Storms now, and the vessel's course was east and northerly, with a calm sea and a fair wind.

Every one should have been in the highest spirits; but, save Ethel and Rose, Morley and his three companions, all were cloudy, anxious, and dull; for Captain Phillips, his officers, and Mr. Basset felt themselves still menaced by secret dangers.

During the most of this day Morley had remained below with Ethel. Rose was working beads on a cigar-case for the doctor, and Tom Bartelot, with Morrison, remained by choice on deck.

"Now that we can be of service, Captain Phillips," said Tom, "we must be allowed to take our turn of duty. I know that sick folks are soon deemed little better than skulkers aboard ship."

"How so?"

"When one has to take a fellow's trick at the helm, another his look-out aloft, or out upon the booms, a third his watch, and a fourth something else, they soon weary of him."

"True," replied Captain Phillips, in a low voice, as they drew near the break of the deck, and beyond ear-shot of that tall son of Columbia, Mr. William Badger, who was at the wheel, with his very long legs, half-cased in very short trousers, placed very far apart; "but your arrival on board, if a lucky circumstance for you all, has been rather a godsend to me."

"Indeed! How? The ship doesn't look short-handed."

"Ah! here comes Mr. Ashton; and please call your mate here. I have something to say to you all."

Tom beckoned Morrison, who had been busy coiling and belaying some of the running rigging, for the crew had become exceedingly untidy and neglectful.

Badger's keen eyes peered from under his beetling brows, as if he strove to see, what he could not overhear, the conversation that ensued, when Captain Phillips detailed the secret state of his crew, and the daring project which the doctor had heard so freely canvassed in the forecastle.

Bartelot and Morrison heard the honest captain's narrative with astonishment and indignation, but Morley with a terror and agony very much akin to Mr. Basset's, under the same circumstances.

"In such a state of matters, why did you not haul up for Table Bay, where some ships of war are sure to be?" asked Bartelot.

"Such was my intention; but the same hurricane that destroyed your ship drove mine too far to the southward. That circumstance made us the means of saving you; but I lost thereby a chance of thinning out, or altogether dispersing the crew, and shipping another."

"Aye, aye," observed Morrison; "what between crews of Lascars and coloured men, Chinese junks and piratical Bornese boats, there are many craft disappear in these seas, and at Lloyd's the typhoons are held responsible for all."

"If that fellow who is at the wheel, and two who are named Barradas, were quietly overboard, I could manage the rest, I think."

"Barradas! are they Spaniards?" asked Tom.

"Spanish South Americans--two of that bad lot who are so often to be seen loafing about the Liverpool docks."

"Troublesome hands always."

"And these two are among the worst--the very worst. They were chums of that fellow Hawkshaw in Texas and Mexico, at the gold diggings, and elsewhere, it would appear. They are two brothers, named Pedro and Zuares--at heart, pirates both."

"Barradas!" said Morley, striving to remember; "that name seems familiar to me."

"Have you forgotten the name of the old hermit--the 'darvish,' as Noah called him--whom we buried on the island, and whose papers I read to you?" asked Morrison.

"Don Pedro Zuares de Barradas," said Bartelot.

"I remember now. I have his Spanish cross below," said Morley. "Good Heavens! if these should be his sons! The names are the same. How singular!"

"And they were comrades of Hawkshaw, you say, Captain Phillips?"

"Comrades, or shipmates, or something--nothing good, you may be assured."

And now Morley, just as Dr. Heriot joined them, recalled Hawkshaw's strange story of how the one named Zuares committed--unwittingly, however--the awful crime of matricide, in the Barranca Secca--that savage story which he related on a summer evening in Acton Chase, to the Bassets and Pages; and now, by a strange fatality, their lot was all cast together within the narrow compass of a single ship, upon the wide and lonely sea.

"These are most calamitous tidings," said Morley, in a low and troubled voice, as he passed his arm through Heriot's, and drew him aside; "love, they say, laughs at danger; but here, Dr. Heriot, love may weep," he added, almost with a groan.

"Hang it, man, call me Heriot--Leslie Heriot, or whatever you like; but drop the doctor, it sounds so precious stiff, especially when--when we both love these two girls."

"Well," said Morley, who, as an Englishman, had his local or national prejudices, but meant to be complimentary, "for a Scotchman, you are a nice fellow, Heriot; but--but Ethel and Rose, what are we to do now?"

"Fight to the last gasp for them, that is all," replied Heriot, stoutly.

While they were conversing thus, Noah Gawthrop approached Captain Bartelot, and, in his own fashion, began to state that he had heard some strange hints dropped by the watch at night, by others that lounged about the windlass-bitts and forecastle; that some of the crew had been whetting their knives on the carpenter's grindstone, that all were on the alert, and were, he added, "sartainly up to summut that looked like squalls, or mischief."

As an old man-o'-war's man, Noah knew well how unpleasant was the reputation of being a tale-bearer, and that, if it was bad ashore, it was deemed ten times worse at sea; but in the _Aurora_ he had acquired certain ideas of discipline which had never left him, so he considered that he was only doing his duty in this matter.

"What do you mean to do, your honour?" he asked of Captain Phillips, in a husky whisper.

Phillips gave him a grim smile, and showed the butt of a revolver in his breast-pocket.

"Oh, the poor girls below," said Morley.

"I have perilled my life many times, young gentleman," said Phillips--"many times on land, but oftener still on the great highway of waters, and, though scared a bit, I ain't going to be frightened now; and, believe me, my ship shall not be taken without a scrimmage. Let these mutinous curs come on and do their worst, I'm ready for them--life for life, and man to man."

"Hooray, and the _Haurora_ for ever. Beat to quarters--them's my sentiments," said Noah, with a voice so loud that long Badger, at the wheel, craned his scraggy neck to listen, and opened his eyes and ears very wide indeed. "D----n their limbs! I hopes to see 'em all with their ears nailed to the mainmast, and here's the fist as will handle the hammer and nails."

As he made this unwise exclamation, he stepped aft, to relieve Badger at the wheel, and that ungainly personage, avoiding the group who were at the gangway, passed forward to the forecastle, where he at once informed his colleagues that he "rayther reckoned that old man-o'-war shark had blowed the whole affair upon them."

Deeply-muttered oaths and vows of vengeance on poor old Noah were the immediate result.

"_Por mi honor!_" exclaimed Pedro, who was polishing the blade of his knife on the sole of his shoe; "so, so, this is what old sticking-plaster is up to--eh?"

"In course, my Spanish gamecock."

"_El espio y picaro!_ (spy and scoundrel)," said Pedro, grinding his teeth.

"The old corksucker!" growled the rest, using in this the most opprobrious epithet known at sea.

"He's a old man-o'-war's man, and, I reckon, has got notions o' discipline, doffing his hat to the quarter-deck, and other darned nonsense whipped into him, nigger fashion, by the boatswain's cat. To try gettin' over such fellows is summut like reefing of a stun'sail, or anythin' else that's next to useless."

Having delivered himself of this aphorism, Badger proceeded to "darn" sundry parts of Noah's person, such as his eyes and limbs, and by the unanimous vote of all he was consigned to very warm latitudes indeed.

Amid this, the ship's bell struck. It was the appointed time--four bells in the second dog-watch--and then, pale as a spectre, or looking like an evil spirit whom the sound had summoned--Cramply Hawkshaw descended through the scuttle into the little apartment, or fore-cabin, a close and squalid den, where his appearance was greeted with shouts of ironical welcome and applause, in which the watch on deck joined.

We have already detailed a scene in this unpleasant quarter of the ship; but have little desire to rehearse another, and so shall be brief.

With a mocking grimace on his moustached lip, and a ferocious gleam in his wild black eyes, Pedro presented Hawkshaw to the crew as a new _companero amigo_--associate and friend.

"Hitch in, mates--make room for the capting," said Badger, drawing in his long, lean, and misshapen legs. "So having 'ad a spell in limbo aft, you're bound for the bunks forward, eh? Come, Pedro, prodooce the dev'l's bones--let him have a shy with the ivories. I reckon he's got an eye on the gals aft, as well as ourselves; and I say, capting--Jeerusalem! ain't the black eyes o' that oldest gal regular Broadway shiners!"

In his misery and rage, Hawkshaw had slunk forward, and joined the crew with two ideas uppermost in his mind: that he would yet revenge himself on Morley Ashton, and might also have the haughty Ethel at his mercy--that she yet might be his, and his only, despite fate, fortune, and friends, and despite her own aversion for him.

But when he found himself among this crew of desperadoes, whose obscene lips bandied about the names of those so pure and gentle, fair and tender, as Ethel and Rose Basset, the old times of Laurel Lodge came to memory, and though bad, hardened, and desperate, Hawkshaw felt his soul die within him.

But it was too late for receding now!

Criminal though he was, to find himself the chosen comrade and companion of these wretches, filled up the full measure of his misery; but no sympathy can be wasted on him, when we remember the crimes of which he had been guilty, and the keen suffering he had caused to Ethel, to Morley, and to others.

In mockery, and in a pretended spirit of good fellowship, Pedro's loaded _dados_ were produced from his sea-chest, and they proceeded again to cast lots for wives among the women in the cabin, amid roars of laughter, cheers, and other noises, while, to enhance the general din, Mr. Badger smashed the mess-beef kid, dashed the butter gallipot to pieces, and danced a hornpipe on the tin bread-barge.

This noisy laughter was heard distinctly in the cabin.

"Surely that sounds jolly and well," said Tom Bartelot, as the party from the deck entered it; "fellows who laugh so loudly cannot mean much mischief."

"Ah, you don't know them," said Captain Phillips, in a low voice.

"Mischief?" said Ethel, looking up inquiringly.

"What, is it possible that you don't know?" Morley was beginning, when Mr. Basset placed a finger on his lip warningly.

Those extremely hilarious sounds in the forepart of the ship were simply caused by the lots for sweethearts or wives being cast anew.

Ethel had fallen to Pedro Barradas, thanks to his peculiarly-constructed dice; Rose fell to the share of Bill Badger; and Nance Folgate, the old nurse, to Hawkshaw; and hence the yells and screams of laughter that ascended from the fore-scuttle, and rang upon the still and starlight night.