CHAPTER XXIV

THE CREW OF THE BARQUE

Miss Temple released my arm and sank upon a bench.

‘Can you doubt now that he is mad?’ she exclaimed.

‘Somewhat eccentric, certainly, but perhaps not mad, though. He is treating us very kindly. How intelligently he instructed his man in regard to our cabins!’

‘He may be kind; but I believe we should have been safer on the hull than here.’

‘Oh no, no, no!’

‘But I say yes,’ she exclaimed in her most imperious air, and gazing at me with hot and glowing eyes. ‘It is quite true the wreck was burnt; but if this vessel had not come into sight, you would not have signalled, and then the hull would not have been set on fire. It is maddening to think that perhaps within the next three or four hours the Indiaman or the corvette may sail over the very spot where the wreck blew up.’

‘I heartily hope that one or the other will do so,’ said I; ‘for if she be so close to us as all that, we’re bound to fall in with her.’

She looked at her hands, turning her fingers back and front, as though they were some novel and unexpected sight to her.

‘I wonder, Mr. Dugdale,’ said she, ‘you can doubt that the man is insane. Remember the extraordinary questions he put to you when we first arrived. I believe, had you told him you were ignorant of navigation, he would have sent us back to the wreck. And then how he stares! There is something shocking in the fixed regard of his dreadfully inanimate black eyes. What a very extraordinary face, too! I cannot believe that he is a sailor. He has the appearance of a monk just released from some term of fearful penance and mortification.’

‘On the other hand he has received us very kindly. He would not suffer you to speak of paying him. He promptly set us down to such entertainment as his vessel furnishes. He may be mad half-way round the compass, but all the rest of the points are sound,’

‘I am astonished,’ she cried with a manner of petulant vivacity, ‘to hear you say that we are safer in this ship than had we remained in the hull. There we were alone; but who are the people with whom we must be locked up in this vessel until we sight the Indiaman or some sail that will receive us? A murderer--convicts--mutineers--a crew of men in whose sight a jewel must not be exhibited lest they should be tempted. Tempted to what?’ She violently shuddered. ‘How can you speak of this ship as safer than the wreck?’

‘Because I happen to feel quite certain that she is; but I will not say so, for it vexes you to hear me.’

‘Oh this ridiculous, this horribly ridiculous degrading situation fills me with anger. To think of being reduced to a perfect state of squalor--having to conceal one’s jewelry for fear of--of--something awful, I am sure; and you dare not, though you _could_ name it, Mr. Dugdale.’ I smiled, and her warmth increased. ‘That I should have been ever tempted,’ she proceeded, ‘to undertake the odious voyage to Bombay, for _this_! To be without a change of dress, to be obliged to sleep in a little dark horrid cabin, and meanwhile not to have the least notion when it is all to end!’

Well, thought I, as I looked at her eyes shining with spirit and temper, and marked the faint hectic of her ill-humour in her cheeks, the expression of mingled pride and fretfulness in her lips, the wrathful rising and falling of her breast, here, to be sure, is a new version of the play of Katharine and Petruchio; only, though she be Kate to the life, it is not I, but old daddy Neptune who is to break her spirit, and unshrew her into somebody’s very humble servant. But is there any magic, I thought, even in ocean’s rough, brutal, unconscionable usage to render docile such a woman as this? Nay, would any man wish it otherwise with her than as it is when he gazes at her eyes and figure, beholds the dignity and haughtiness of her carriage, the assumption of maiden sovereignty visible in every move of her arm, in every curl of her lip, in every motion of her form!

‘What are you thinking of?’ she asked: ‘you are plunged in thought. I hope you are struggling to do justice to my perception of the truth.’

I started, and then laughed out. ‘I will not tell you what I was thinking of,’ said I; ‘but I will express what was in my mind whilst you were speaking just now. You dwell with horror upon the captain’s account of his crew. Well, I heartily wish for both our sakes that they were an honest straight-headed body of men. But then every ship’s forecastle is a menagerie. There is ruffianism, and there is respectability. Quite likely that the carpenter Lush may have killed a man; but one must hear the story before deciding to call him a murderer. So of the convicts; so of the mutineers. In many ships at sea there is unspeakable provocation, and crimes are committed of which the blood rests upon the head of anyone sooner than those who are held guilty and punished by the law. I am not to be greatly frightened by Captain Braine’s talk of his crew, particularly since in a few days we may either be on board the Indiaman or homeward-bound in another ship. Let us now go on deck. I wish to take a view of the sailors, and see what sort of a craft this is, for as yet I have seen but little of her.’

I could not help remarking that she kept very close to me as we made our way out of the cuddy, and that the glances she directed forwards where some seamen were at work were full of apprehension. The short poop of the _Lady Blanche_ was gained by a central ladder falling fair in the face of the little doorway of the cuddy front with its two small windows and row of buckets. A low, handsomely carved wooden rail was fixed athwart the break of this raised deck, and I stood with Miss Temple at a point of it that provided me with a clear view fore and aft. The captain sat on a grating abaft the wheel reading. Mr. Lush was near the mizzen rigging, gazing seawards with a stubborn wooden expression of face. After the spacious decks and wide topgallant-forecastle of the Indiaman, this little _Lady Blanche_ looked a mere toy. But though a ship shows least admirably from her own deck, I found a deal to please and even delight me in the first comprehensive look I threw around. She was as clean as a yacht; the insides of her bulwarks were painted a delicate green, and they were as spotless as though the brush were just off them; on either side were two little brass guns, mounted on carriages, and they shone as freshly as though the sunlight were upon them; the running gear was everywhere neatly coiled away. The small caboose, with its smoking chimney, abaft the foremast; the length of windlass close in under the overlap of the short space of forecastle; the white longboat; the white scuttle-butt abreast of it; the little winch abaft the mainmast; the brass-lined circle of the wheel in the grasp of the sober, good-tempered-looking old fellow who had made one of the boat’s crew; the two shapely clinker-built quarter-boats hanging at the davits abreast of the mizzen mast--these and much more seemed details of a miniature delicacy and finish, that entered with surprising effect into the fabric’s general character of toy-like grace and elegance. On high, the white canvas soared in symmetrical spaces; but after the towering spires of the Indiaman, the main-yard of this little barque seemed within reach of the hand, and the tiny skysail that crowned the summit of the airy, snow-white, faintly-swelling cloths, no bigger than a lady’s pocket-handkerchief.

‘This is really a beautiful little ship, Miss Temple,’ said I.

‘I might be able to admire her from the deck of the _Countess Ida_,’ she answered; ‘but there must be happiness to enable me to find beauty, and I am not happy here.’

I searched the sea-line, but it was as bare and flawless as the rim of a brand-new guinea. The dull shadow of the morning still overspread the heavens; it was the same leaden sky, with here and there a little break of faintness, revealing some edge of apparently motionless cloud, and the ocean lay sallow beneath it, darker than it was for the pencilling of the ripples which wrinkled the wide expanse as they rode the long, light heave of the swell. There were some sailors at work in the waist on jobs, of which I forget the nature; I examined them attentively--they were within easy eyeshot; but though there was no lack of prejudice in my observation, I protest I could find nothing rascally in their appearance. They were all of them of the then familiar type of merchant seaman, as like to members of the crew of the Indiaman as one pea is to another; faces burnt by the sun and decorated with the usual assemblage of warts and moles, all of them of an unmistakably English cut--I am speaking of the five of them then visible--dressed in the rough apparel of the ocean, rude shirts revealing the bare hairy breast, duck breeches with stains of oil and tar in them which there was no virtue in the scrubbing-brush and the lee-scuppers to remedy. Miss Temple, standing at my side, gazed at them.

‘They have quite the look of cut-throats, I think,’ said she.

‘Well, now, to my fancy,’ said I, ‘they seem as honest a set of lively hearties as one could wish to sail with.’

‘You merely say that to encourage me,’ she exclaimed with a pout of vexation. ‘Observe that man with the black beard--the one that is nearest to us. Could you figure a completer likeness of a pirate? I do not like his way of glancing at us out of the corner of his eyes. An honest sailor would stare boldly.’

I laughed, and then put on a face of apology.

‘You will be smiling at these fears in a few days, I hope,’ I exclaimed.

‘Yes; but it is the meanwhile we have to think of,’ she answered. ‘Look at that man there’--meaning Mr. Lush; ‘pray, tell me, Mr. Dugdale, that he has a very handsome, manly, good-tempered face.’

‘No; I confess I don’t like his appearance,’ I answered, stealing a peep at the sulky-looking old dog, who continued to stare at the horizon with the immovability of a figure-head; ‘yet inside of that hide there may be stowed away a very worthy member of society. A crab-apple is not a fruit to delight the eye; but I believe it is wholesome eating, though a trifle austere.’

At that moment the captain looked up from his book, and after taking a prolonged view of us, came in a slow walk to where we were standing, holding the volume in his hand.

‘You have a charming little ship here, captain,’ said I; ‘I am exceedingly pleased with her.’

‘Yes, sir; she’s a handy craft. She will do her work,’ he answered, sending his unwinking eyes with their sort of slow dead look along the deck.

‘Which of those men down there are the convicts and mutineers?’ began Miss Temple.

He whipped round upon her with a vehemence of manner that seemed a veritable fury of temper to the first seeing and hearing of it.

‘For God Almighty’s sake, not a word! D’ye want to see me a murdered man?’ He twisted round on to me: ‘Sir, you are to know nothing if you please. This lady is to know nothing. I asked ye both in the cabin to be secret. God’s death! if that man yonder had overheard her!’ He stopped short, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder at Lush.

Miss Temple was deadly pale. She had the same cowed air I had observed in her during our first few hours aboard the wreck.

‘I am very sorry--’ she muttered.

‘For the love of God, mem!’ he exclaimed in a whisper, putting his finger to his lips.

It was time to change the subject. I asked him how long he had occupied in his passage from the Thames to this point, spoke of the light trade-wind and baffling airs we had encountered, told him once again of the privateering brig, asked him what he thought would be the chance of the corvette’s cutter in such weather as she went adrift in, and in this way coaxed him out of his temper until I had got him to some posture of affability once more. I do not recollect the number of days he named as contained in his passage from London, but I can remember that it was a very swift run, proving daily totals which must have come very near to steam at times.

‘Such a nimble keel as this should make you very easy, Miss Temple,’ said I; ‘why, here is a craft to sail round and round the _Countess Ida_. Even though we shouldn’t pick her up, it is fifty to one that of all her passengers we two shall be the first to arrive in India.’

She fastened her eyes upon the deck with a countenance of incredulity and despair.

‘I suppose your port will be St. Louis, sir?’ said I.

He stared at me for some moments without speaking, and then slowly inclined his head in a single nod.

‘I was never in that island,’ I continued; ‘but I presume we shall not be at a loss for a vessel to carry us to some part of India whence we may easily make our way to Bombay.’

His lack-lustre gaze seemed to grow deader as, after a pause, he exclaimed: ‘There’ll be some French skipper to make terms with, I don’t doubt, for a passage north.’

‘You talk, Mr. Dugdale,’ said Miss Temple, ‘as though you were well assured that we should not fall in with the Indiaman.’

‘I am desirous of creating plenty of chances for ourselves,’ said I; then gathering that this might not be a topic profitable to pursue in the presence of so singular a listener as Captain Braine, I again branched off. ‘How many,’ said I carelessly, ‘go to a crew with you, captain?’

He answered leisurely: ‘Thirteen as we now are, all told. There was fourteen afore Mr. Chicken died.’

‘Well, even at that,’ said I, ‘a single watch should be able to reef down for you. I suppose’--here I sunk my voice--‘that Mr. Lush yonder is now your chief mate?’

‘No,’ he replied, speaking stealthily; ‘I’m my own chief mate. He’s the ship’s carpenter, and stands watch as second officer. But what are ye to do,’ he proceeded, preserving his stealthy delivery, ‘with a man whose education don’t let him go no further than making a mark for his name?’

‘Then, I take it, there is nobody aboard capable of navigating the vessel but yourself?’

‘We’ll talk about that presently,’ said he with a singular look, and pointing with his finger to the deck.

I observed that Miss Temple narrowly watched him.

‘Was Mr. Chicken a pretty good navigator?’ said I.

He appeared to forget himself in thought, then with a slow emerging air, so to speak, and a steadfast, quite embarrassing stare, he responded: ‘Chicken was acquainted with the use of the sextant. He likewise understood the meaning of Greenwich time. He couldn’t take a star; but his reckonings was always close when he got them out of the sun. He’d been bred a collierman, and it took him some time to recover the loss of coasts and lee shores and lights. But he was a good sailor, and a religious man; and his death was a blow, sir.’

‘Almost a pity that it wasn’t Mr. Lush who was beckoned overboard,’ said I. (The carpenter had now trudged aft, and was looking into the compass out of hearing.)

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Captain Braine, heaving a deep sigh and shaking his head: ‘Lush’s loss would have been my gain. One Chicken was worth all the Lushes that were ever afloat.--But hush, mem, if _you_ please.’

‘I shall certainly say nothing more about your crew,’ exclaimed Miss Temple quickly and a little haughtily, while she slightly recoiled from the face he turned upon her.

‘Have you any books aboard, Captain Braine?’ said I, glancing at the volume he held in his hand. ‘Any sort of amusement in the shape of chess or cards to help Miss Temple and myself to kill an hour or two from time to time?’

‘There are some vollums in Chicken’s cabin that belonged to him,’ answered Captain Braine. ‘I’ve read two or three of them. His cargo that way was usually edifying. There’s Baxter’s “Shove:” a good yarn; there’s the “Pilgrim’s Progress;” and there’s the “Whole Dooty o’ Man”--a bit leewardly; I couldn’t fetch to windward in it myself. For my part, one book’s enough for me; and excepting some vollums on navigation, it is the only work I goes to sea with.’

‘The Bible!’ I exclaimed, taking it from him. I was astonished and pleased. There seemed little for one to apprehend in the character of a man who could dedicate his leisure to the study of that Book, and I was sensible of an emotion of respect for the strange-looking, staring figure as I returned the little volume to him.

He dropped it into a side-pocket, and then most abruptly walked to the rail, took a long look at the weather and a long look aloft, trudged over to Mr. Lush, with whom he exchanged a sentence or two, and immediately afterwards disappeared down the companion.

For some time after this Miss Temple and I paced the deck together. There was much to talk about, and my companion found a deal to say about Captain Braine, whilst, as we walked, I would catch her taking furtive peeps at Mr. Lush, who, it was easy to see, had inspired her with aversion and fear, though the man had not offered to address a word to us, nor had he once looked our way, thirstily inquisitive as his stare had been whilst in the boat. I could not help contrasting her behaviour now with what I recollected of it aboard the _Countess Ida_. She had put her hand into my arm, and the intimacy of our association in this way might well have suggested an affianced pair. She talked eagerly and with all the passion of the many emotions which rose in her with her references, to our situation, to her aunt, to the chance of our sighting the Indiaman, and the like; and I don’t doubt that the men who watched us from the forepart of the vessel put us down either as husband and wife or a betrothed couple.

And all this in three days! Three days ago she could hardly bring herself to speak or even to look at me; and now fortune had contrived that she should have no other companion, that she should be locked up with me alone in a dismasted hull, and then be brought, always with me at her side, into a vessel where, as she believed, there was much more to fill us with alarm than in the worst of the conditions which entered into our existence aboard the wreck! Again and again she would ask, with her dark and glowing eyes bent with an expression of despair upon my face, when it was to end and how it was to end; and these questions my heart would echo as I gazed at the cold and alarmed beauty of her face, but with a very different meaning from what she attached to the inquiries.

At last she grew weary of walking, and I took her below and sat with her awhile on a cushioned locker. It was now drawing on to four o’clock in the afternoon; the breeze quiet, the sky in shadow, the sea very smooth save for the soft undulation of the swell, which pleasantly and soothingly cradled the little fabric as she slipped through it, of a milky white from water-line to truck, to the impulse of her wide overhanging pinions. After a bit, I observed a heaviness in the lids of my companion, and urged her to lie down and take some rest. She consented; and I lingered at her side until sleep overcame her, and then I stood for awhile surveying with deep admiration the calm sweetness of her face, into which had stolen the tenderness of the unconscious woman, softening down the haughty arching of eyebrow, unbending the imperious set of the mouth. It was as though her spirit clad in her own beauty was revealed to me disrobed of all the trappings of the waking humours. I could have knelt by her side, and in that posture have watched her for an hour. Can it be, thought I, as I crept softly to the cuddy door, that I am in love with her?

I leisurely filled my pipe from the hunk of tobacco I had met with in the wreck, taking, whilst I did so, as I stood on the quarter-deck, a good steady look at such of the sailors as were about, though I contrived an idly curious manner, and directed my eyes as often at the barque’s furniture as at the seamen. After I had been on the poop a few minutes, Mr. Lush left it to go forward; and with my pipe betwixt my teeth, I lounged over to the binnacle to see how the ship headed. The man who grasped the spokes was the honest-faced fellow I had before noticed at the wheel; he, I mean, of the minute eyes and whiskers joined at his throat, who had addressed me in the boat whilst we lay alongside the hull. I noticed that he seemed to stir a little uneasily as I approached, as though nervously meditating a speech, and I had scarcely glanced into the compass bowl when he exclaimed: ‘I beg your pardon, sir.’

I looked at him.

‘The noose,’ said he, ‘came forrads afore I lay aft for this here trick that the ship you came out of and lost sight of was the _Countess Ida_.’

‘That is so,’ I exclaimed.

‘Might I make so bold,’ he continued, slightly moving the wheel, and bringing his specks of eyes into a squint over my head as he sent a glance at the tiny skysail pulling under the main-truck, ‘as to inquire if so be that the bo’sun of that ship was a man named Smallridge?’

‘Yes, Smallridge; that was the boatswain’s name,’ I replied, warming up to the mere reference to that hearty sailor.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘I heerd that he was agoing bo’sun in that ship, and I was pretty nigh signing for her myself, only that her date of sailing didn’t give me quite long enough ashore. And how _is_ Mr. Smallridge, sir?’

‘Very well indeed,’ said I.

‘I’ve got a perticler respect for Mr. Smallridge,’ he continued; ‘he kep’ company with my sister for some time, and would ha’ married her, but she tailed on to a sojer whilst he was away, prefarring the lobster to the shellback, sir. Well, I’m glad to larn that he’s hearty, I’m sure. If so be as we should fall in with the _Countess Ida_, and put you aboard without my seeing of Mr. Smallridge, I’d take it werry kind, sir, if you’d give him Joe Wetherly’s respects.’

‘I certainly will,’ said I with alacrity; ‘but I fear there is little chance of our meeting with the Indiaman.’

‘Well, there’s no telling,’ he exclaimed; ‘but she’ll have to be right in this here barque’s road, supposing her to be ahead; and if we should pass her in the dark, why, then, good-night! for she’s like grease in the water is this here _Lady Blanche_.’

‘Smallridge and I were very good friends. He’d been a sailor in the ship I was afterwards midshipman in.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ cried he. ‘And so _you_ was at sea, sir?’

I was about to reply, designing to lead him on into answering certain questions I had in my mind concerning the captain and crew of the barque, when Mr. Lush came up the poop ladder; so, knowing the etiquette, I hauled off, but with the full intention of sounding Mr. Joe Weatherly at large when an opportunity should offer.