CHAPTER XV

A SINGULAR PLOT

It speedily ran amongst us of the cuddy that the dead sailor who had been so very impressively interred by old Keeling had returned to the ship, and was alive in some part of her, secure in handcuffs or in leg-irons; but so much was made of the fire which had broken out that Crabb’s reappearance lost as a miracle half the weight it would have carried had it happened alone. Besides, the sense of the people soon gathered that the business was a plot which had been managed with astonishing cleverness, and it all seemed plain as mud in a wine-glass when the whisper went round that Hemmeridge was under arrest as an arch-conspirator in the matter. And certainly it made one feel far from comfortable even to think that for the past weeks a ruffian of a true piratical complexion had been secreted in the ship’s hold, where his confederates would keep him supplied with tobacco and the means of lighting it, and where, in his borings and pryings, he was tolerably certain to have stumbled upon something inflammatory in the shape of spirits. Indeed, it made me draw my breath short when my mind went to the rum puncheons and the powder-magazine below, and to the vision of Crabb, drunk, stupidly groping with a naked light in his hand, during some midnight hour, maybe, when we were all in bed.

However, the imagination of the passengers would hardly go to these lengths. Their thoughts held to the fire, and their talk chiefly concerned it. When the skipper came below for a glass of grog that night, the ladies so baited him with questions that one pitied him almost for not being able to enjoy the privilege of venting his heated soul in a few strong words.

‘I _cannot_ satisfy myself, Captain Keeling, that the fire is utterly extinguished,’ said Mrs. Bannister.

‘Might it not burst out again, capting?’ cried Mrs. Hudson. ‘There should be plenty of pails kept filled with water ready to empty if smoke is smelt.’

‘Perhaps something may be on fire even now!’ exclaimed Mrs Joliffe, ‘something that doesn’t make a smoke; and how _then_ are the sailors to tell if all is right in the bottom of the ship?’

‘Captain Keeling,’ cried Mrs. Trevor, ‘is it quite safe to go to bed, do you think?’

‘If a fire should break out,’ said Miss Hudson in a trembling voice, as though shudder after shudder were chasing through her, ‘how can we depend upon being called? It is impossible to hear downstairs what is going on on deck.’

Poor old marline-spike made a bolt of it at last, fairly turning tail and rushing up the companion steps when it came to the colonel striking in and topping off the female broadsides by inquiries of a like nature delivered at the very height of his pipes.

However, the night passed quietly; and when next morning came and the people assembled at breakfast, all fear of fire was seemingly gone, and little more was talked about than Crabb and what his designs had been, the topic gathering no mean accentuation from the doctor’s vacant place. Somewhere about ten o’clock I was standing at the taffrail watching the ship’s wake, that was languidly streaming off in a short oily surface, and wondering whether, if we were to fall in with nothing brisker than these faint airs and draughts of wind, all hands would not have grown white-haired and decrepit by the time we were up with the Cape, leaving the Indian Ocean and Bombay out of consideration, when the head-steward came up to me.

‘Captain Keeling’s compliments, sir, and he’ll feel greatly hobliged, providing you’re not hotherwise occupied, by your stepping to his cabin, sir.’

‘Oh yes, with pleasure,’ said I. ‘Is he alone?’

‘He is not, sir.’

I went down the companion steps, knocked at the captain’s door, and entered. It was a roomy interior, a very noble ship’s berth, occupying hard upon the width of the deck right aft, saving, as I have before described, a sort of small chart-room alongside, bulkheaded off. There was a large stern window, after the olden fashion, with the blue line of the horizon gently sliding up and down it, and a shivering light lifting off the sea to the glass, sharp and of a sort of azure brilliancy, as though from diamonds set a-trembling. Keeling, in full fig, his face showing of a dark red against some maple-coloured ground of bulkhead or ship’s side, was seated at a table. He instantly rose on my entering, gave me one of his wire-drawn bows, and motioned me to a seat, thanking me in a few words for coming. On the starboard hand stood Crabb and the sailmaker, handcuffed, and on either side of them was a seaman with a cutlass dangling at his hip. On the port hand sat Dr. Hemmeridge, his legs crossed, his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his head drooped. He was deadly pale, and looked horribly ill and worried. Near him was one of the sailors, a young fellow of some seven or eight and twenty, with a quantity of hair falling over his brow, a straggling beard, and small black eyes, which roamed swiftly in glances charged methought with the spirit of mutiny and menace and defiance. Mr. Prance was at the captain’s elbow; and the third mate was seated at an end of the table with a pen in his hand and some paper in front of him.

I bowed to Hemmeridge, but he took no notice. Until the captain addressed me, I stared hard at Crabb; for even now, with the ugly ruffian standing before me, my mind found it difficult to realise that he was alive; that the creature I gazed at was the man whom all hands of us, with an exception or two, supposed overboard a thousand fathoms deep. There was, besides, the fascination of his ugliness. The hunch-like curve of his back, his little blood-stained eyes looking away from his nose, as though they sought to peer at something at the back of his head, the greasy trail of carroty hair upon his back, the fragment of nose over his hare-lip, these and the rest of him combined into the representation of the most extravagantly grotesque, ill-favoured figure ever witnessed outside the bars of a menagerie. The sailmaker’s face was as white as one of his bolts of canvas, but it wore a determined look, though I noticed a quivering in the nostrils of his high-perched nose, and a constant uneasy movement of the fingers, as of dying hands plucking at bedclothes.

‘Mr. Dugdale,’ exclaimed old Keeling with the dignity and gravity of a judge, ‘I’ve taken the liberty to send for you, as I am informed by Mr. Prance that when that man there’--inclining his head towards Crabb without looking at him--‘was lying, as it was supposed, dead in his bunk, you accompanied Mr. Hemmeridge, the ship’s surgeon’--here he indicated the doctor with a motion of his head but without looking at him either--‘into the forecastle, and stood for some considerable time surveying the so-called corpse.’

‘That is quite true,’ said I.

‘Did Mr. Hemmeridge expose the man’s face to you?’

‘He did.’

‘What impression was produced upon your mind by the sight of the--of the--body?’

Crabb gave a horrible grin.

‘That he was stone-dead, Captain Keeling; so stone-dead, sir, that I can scarcely credit the man himself is now before me.’

Hemmeridge looked up and fixed his eyes upon me.

‘It is but reasonable I should inform you, Mr. Dugdale,’ continued old marline-spike, ‘that Mr. Hemmeridge is under arrest on suspicion of conspiring with Crabb, with Willett, and with Thomas Bobbins’--he glanced at the man who stood next to the doctor--‘to plunder the ship. Bobbins has given evidence that leaves me in no doubt as to the guilt of Crabb and Willett.’

Crabb uttered a curse through his teeth, accompanied with a look at the young seaman, in the one-eyed gleam of which murder methought was writ too large to be mistaken for any other intention. Old Keeling did not heed him.

‘Bobbins’s story,’ he continued, ‘is to this effect: that Crabb was to swallow a potion which would produce the appearance of death; that the sailmaker was to have a hammock weighted, shaped, and in all respects equipped to resemble the one in which Crabb would be stitched up: that in the dead of night, when the ship was silent, and the deck forward vacant, the sham hammock was to be placed upon the fore-hatch by the sailmaker and Bobbins, and the cover containing that man’--inclining his head at Crabb--‘conveyed into the sailmaker’s cabin, where it was to be cut open, the man freed, and secreted in the berth till consciousness had returned, and he was in a fit state to seize the first opportunity of sneaking into the hold. All this was done,’ old Keeling went on, Mr. Prance meanwhile looking as grave as an owl over the skipper’s shoulder, whilst every now and again a hideous grin would distort Crabb’s frightful mouth, though the sailmaker continued to stare at the captain with a white and determined countenance, and Hemmeridge to listen with a frowning worried look, his leg that crossed the other swinging like a pendulum. ‘The man Crabb got into the hold, was supplied with food and drink by Willett and Bobbins, and with tools to enable him to break into the mail-room’----

‘And I’d ha’ done it too,’ here interrupted Crabb in a voice like a saw going through a balk of timber, ‘if it hadn’t been for the stinking smoke of them blasted blankets.’

‘This inquiry,’ continued Keeling, ‘now entirely concerns Mr. Hemmeridge. You tell me, Mr. Dugdale, that Crabb seemed to you as a stone-dead man.’

‘The devil himself couldn’t ha’ told the difference,’ bawled Crabb. ‘_He’s_ not in it,’ insolently motioning with his elbow towards the doctor. ‘Wouldn’t that blooming Bobbins ha’ said so?’ and he darted another murderous glance at the hairy young sailor.

‘I can assure you, Captain Keeling,’ said I, ‘that the man was perfectly dead. There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that Mr. Hemmeridge was fully convinced the body was a corpse. Convinced, captain, but dissatisfied too; and perhaps,’ said I, with a glance at Crabb, ‘it is a pity for more sakes than one that he did not carry out his idea of a post-mortem examination.’

‘Mr. Dugdale,’ exclaimed Hemmeridge in a low, deep, trembling voice, ‘before God and man, I am innocent; and I hope to live to call Captain Keeling to account for this monstrous slander, this enormous suspicion, this dishonourable and detestable accusation.’

‘I’ve never heered,’ said the man named Bobbins, in a long-drawn whining voice, ‘that this gent was consarned. I remembered Crabb asking what was to be done if so be the surgeon should cut him up to see what he died of, and Mr. Willett kissed the Bible afore Crabb and me to this: that if the surgeon made up his mind to open Crabb, Willett was to show him the bottle of physic, and to tell him that Crabb had took it for some bad complaint, and that, though he might look dead, he worn’t so.’

Crabb hove a fearful curse at the man. The bushy-whiskered sailor who guarded him on the right significantly put his hand upon the hilt of his cutlass whilst he said something to him under his breath.

‘This is new to me,’ exclaimed Keeling, screwing his eye gimlet-fashion into the face of Bobbins, and then letting it drop, as if satisfied. ‘Mr. Hemmeridge, I have _suspected_ you, sir; but it’s a little soon for you to talk of my having _accused_ you. You are a medical man. If anybody knows death by looking upon it you should. Yet, though this man Crabb is merely counterfeiting death, you come aft to me and report him dead! What am I to infer? Your ignorance or your guilt, sir?’

‘Captain Keeling,’ cried I, ‘believe me when I promise you the man was not _counterfeiting_ death. He was to all intents and purposes a corpse. How was this brought about? Surely by no exercise of his own art. The look of the eye--the droop of the jaw--the hue of the skin--Captain Keeling, it was death to the sight: no counterfeit--an effect produced by something much more powerful than the effort of such a will as that man has;’ and I pointed with my thumb at Crabb, who told me with a curse to mind my own business.

‘Mr. Dugdale, I thank you,’ said Hemmeridge, bowing to me.

Captain Keeling held up a long thin phial about three-quarters full of a dark liquor. I had not before noticed it.

‘This has been produced,’ said he, ‘by the man Bobbins, who states that it is the stuff which Crabb swallowed, and which caused the death-like aspect you saw in him.’ He put the bottle down; then clenching his fist, smote the table violently. ‘I cannot credit it!’ he cried. ‘I cannot be imposed on. Am I to believe that there is any drug in existence which will produce in a living being the exact semblance of death?’

‘Oh, I think so, sir,’ said Prance, speaking mildly.

Hemmeridge sneered.

‘A semblance of death,’ roared old Keeling, twisting round upon his chief mate, ‘capable of deceiving the eye--the practised eye of a medical man? You may give me a dose of laudanum, and I may look dead to you, sir, but not to Mr. Hemmeridge yonder. No, sir; I am not to be persuaded,’ and here he brought his fist down upon the table again. ‘It is either gross ignorance or direct connivance, and I mean to be satisfied--I mean to sift it to the bottom--I mean to get at the truth, by----!’

His face was full of blood, and he puffed and blew like a swimmer struggling for his life.

‘You’ve got the truth, and be so-and-so to you,’ broke in Crabb.

The armed sailor ground his elbow into the fellow’s ribs.

‘I am merely here to answer your questions, Captain Keeling,’ said I, ‘and must apologise for taking a single step beyond the object you had in calling me to you; but at least permit me to ask, cannot Mr. Hemmeridge explain the nature of the drug contained in that bottle?’

‘I do not know what it is,’ exclaimed Hemmeridge.

‘Suppose, sir,’ said Mr. Prance, ‘we give Crabb another dose; then you’ll be able to judge for yourself.’

‘You don’t give me no more doses!’ said Crabb. ‘Try it on yourselves.’

The captain sat a little, looking at me vacantly, lost in thought. He suddenly turned to Hemmeridge.

‘You are at liberty, sir; I remove the arrest.’

‘And is that all?’ exclaimed the other, after a brief pause, viewing him steadily. ‘I must have an apology, sir; an apology ample, abundant, satisfying.’

‘I will see you’--began old Keeling, then checked himself. ‘You can leave this cabin, sir.’

Hemmeridge rose from his chair. ‘I leave this cabin, sir,’ said he, ‘and I also leave my duties. Professionally, I do no more in this ship, sir. You have disgraced, you have dishonoured me. But,’ said he, shaking his finger at him, ‘you shall make me amends at Bombay, sir--you shall make me amends at Bombay!’

He stalked from the cabin, old Keeling watching him with a frown, but in silence.

‘Captain,’ I exclaimed, rising as the door closed behind the doctor, ‘I am persuaded that Mr. Hemmeridge is innocent of all participation in this bad business. You have on board a gentleman who, I believe, has a very extensive knowledge of drugs and herbs and the like--I mean Mr. Saunders. It is just possible he might know the nature of the contents of that bottle.’

Keeling reflected a minute, and then said: ‘Mr. Prance, send my compliments to Mr. Saunders, and ask him to my cabin.’

The mate went out; I was following him.

‘Pray, stay a little, Mr. Dugdale,’ said the skipper.--‘Men, take those fellows forward.--Remain where you are,’ he added, turning to Bobbins.

A seaman flung open the door, and Crabb and the sailmaker passed out, followed by the second armed sailor, who silenced some blasphemous abuse that Crabb had paused to deliver, by giving him a shove that drove him headlong into the cuddy.

‘I am sorry to detain you, Mr. Dugdale,’ said the captain. ‘Mr. Saunders is a rather nervous gentleman, and it might be agreeable to him to find you here.’

‘You do not detain me, Captain Keeling. This is an amazing business, almost too wonderful in its way to believe in. Have you ascertained how Crabb became possessed of that magical drug?--and magical it must be, captain, for I give you my word that never showed any corpse deader than that fellow when Hemmeridge removed the canvas from his face.’

‘I beg your honour’s pardon,’ exclaimed Bobbins, preserving his lamenting and whining voice, and knuckling his forehead as he spoke, whilst I could see old Keeling lifting his eyes to him with disgust and aversion strong in his purple countenance. ‘Mr. Willett told me that Crabb ’ud say he’d got that there stuff off a travelling Jew that he fell in with at some Mediterranean port. He bought two lots of it, and tried a dose on a man who took it unbeknown, reckoning it good for spasms. He believed as it had killed the chap, sich was his corpse-like swound; but he come to all right arter four-and-twenty hours, and niver knowed nothen about it, and believed it still to be Monday when it were Toosday. This put the scheme he tried on here into his head.’

‘Has he ever attempted anything of the same sort before?’ inquired Keeling.

‘I dunno, sir. He’s a bad un. It ’ud make a marble heffigy sweat to hear him talk in his sleep.’

There was a knock at the cabin door, and Mr. Prance ushered in Mr. Saunders. The little chap looked very small as he entered, holding his large hat in his hand. He was pale, and stared up at us with something of alarm as we rose to his entrance, the skipper giving him the same hide-bound bow that he had greeted me with.

‘Is Mr. Saunders acquainted with the story of this business, Mr. Prance?’ old Keeling inquired.

‘Yes, sir,’ replied the mate. ‘I gave him the substance of it in a few words as we came along.’

‘It is extremely startling,’ said the little man, climbing on to the chair into which old Keeling had waved him, and dangling his short legs over the edge as a small boy might.

‘Your knowledge of drugs and medicines, Mr. Saunders, is, I believe, very considerable?’ said the skipper. The little fellow bowed. ‘This,’ said Keeling, holding up the phial, ‘is a drug, the stupefying effects of which, I am informed, are so remarkable that any one who takes it entirely loses animation, and presents such an aspect of death as will deceive the eye of the most expert medical practitioner. Is such a thing conceivable, Mr. Saunders?’

The little man reflected very earnestly for some moments, with his eyes fixed upon Keeling. He then asked Mr. Prance to hand him the phial, which he uncorked, and smelt and tasted.

‘I cannot be positive,’ he exclaimed, with a slow, wise shake of his large head; ‘but I strongly suspect this to be what is known as _morion_, the death-wine of Pliny and Dioscorides. Mr. Dugdale, observe the strange, peculiar faint smell--what does it suggest?’

I put the bottle to my nose and sniffed. ‘Opium will it be, Mr. Saunders?’

‘Just so,’ he cried. ‘Captain Keeling, smell you, sir.’

The old skipper applied the bottle to his nostrils and snuffled a little. ‘I should call this a kind of opium,’ said he.

‘If,’ exclaimed Mr. Saunders, ‘it be morion, as I believe it is, it is made from the mandragora or mandrake of the kind that flourishes in Greece and Palestine and in certain parts of the Mediterranean seaboard.’

‘But am I to understand,’ said Keeling, ‘that a dose of it is going to make a man look as dead as if he were killed?’

‘The effect of morion,’ responded Mr. Saunders, ‘is that of suspended animation, scarcely distinguishable from death.’

‘Could it deceive a qualified man such as Dr. Hemmeridge?’ demanded the skipper.

‘I should think it very probable,’ answered little Saunders cautiously; ‘in fact, sir, as we have seen, he _was_ deceived by the effects of that drug, be it morion or anything else.’

‘You can go forward,’ said the captain to Bobbins.

The fellow flourished a hand to his brow and left the cabin.

‘Mr. Saunders, I am obliged to you, sir, for your information,’ continued old Keeling. ‘I trust to have your opinion confirmed either in Bombay or in London. To me it seems a very incredible thing. Mr. Dugdale, I thank you for the trouble you have given yourself to attend here.’

He bowed; and little Saunders and myself, accompanied by Mr. Prance, entered the cuddy.

‘A most extraordinary business altogether,’ cried the little man: ‘it is wonderful enough, supposing the stuff to be morion, that a common sailor should be in possession of such a drug; but much more wonderful yet that it should occur to him to employ it as an instrument in probably the most audacious project ever adventured on board ship.’

‘Hemmeridge might have opened Crabb,’ said I.

‘Well, the rogue foresaw it, and provided against it, as we know,’ exclaimed Mr. Prance. ‘There is pocketable booty in the mail-room to the value of hard upon a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. A man like Crabb will run risks for such plunder, Mr. Dugdale. If the sailmaker had kept his word and produced the bottle to Hemmeridge, the doctor would have been pretty sure to stay his hand.’

‘Why, likely as not,’ I exclaimed: ‘but tell me, Mr. Prance--that fellow Bobbins seems to have been coaxed very easily into peaching.’

‘Ay,’ said he; ‘there’d been an ugly quarrel between him and Willett ten days ago. I believe the rascal would not have split whilst Crabb lay snug and secret in the hold, but on his showing himself, Bobbins took fright, thought of his neck, and being actuated besides by hatred of Willett, came forward and volunteered the whole yarn.’

‘And how is he to be served?’ inquired Mr. Saunders.

‘Left to be at large, sir,’ answered the mate; ‘and punishment enough, too, as any one may suppose, of a false-hearted, lily-livered shipmate who has to swing his hammock three or four months among a forecastle full of hands. For my part,’ added he with a laugh, ‘if I were that miscreant, I’d rather be snug in irons along with Willett and the cast-eyed pirate, stowed safe out of sight.’

He entered his cabin, and Mr. Saunders and I stepped on to the quarter-deck.