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.