CHAPTER XXV

I KEEP A LOOKOUT

I slipped half-way down the little companion ladder to take a peep at Miss Temple, and on observing her to be resting quietly, I returned, and after lighting my pipe anew, stepped over to Mr. Lush, who was employed in cutting off a piece of tobacco from a black cake to serve him as a quid.

‘It is not often hereabouts,’ said I, by way of starting a conversation, ‘that one has a sky like that all day long overhanging one’s mastheads.’

‘No,’ said he; ‘but it’s better than the roasting sun;’ and he opened his lame mouth to receive the cube of tobacco into the hollow of his cheek, whilst he eyed the sky askant, as though in recognition of it as a subject of talk.

‘Did you fall in with the smother that ended in the lady and I being stranded aboard the wreck?’ I inquired.

‘No; there’s been ne’er a smother with us.’

‘The death of Mr. Chicken,’ said I, ‘must have been a blow, seeing that the barque carried but a couple of mates.’

‘How many mates do a ship of this size want?’ said he, without looking at me and slowly masticating.

‘Well, she has only one now, anyway,’ said I.

‘No; she ain’t got even one,’ he exclaimed, with the manner of an ill-tempered man who only listens for the sake of contradiction and argument.

‘Are not _you_ second mate?’ I asked.

‘Not I,’ he replied with a gruff laugh. ‘They calls me second mate, and I keeps watch and watch with the capt’n as if I _was_ second mate; but what I’m signed for is carpenter, and carpenter I be, and there’s nothen more to be made out of me than that, and I don’t care who the bloomin’ blazes hears me say it.’

He drew to the rail by a step and expectorated violently over it. I was too anxious for information about this little ship and her crew to suffer my curiosity to be hindered by the man’s rough, coarse, ill-natured speech and demeanour.

‘I was wondering where you took your meals,’ said I. ‘I now understand. You live forward?’ He gave me a surly nod. ‘But not in the forecastle?’

‘Where else? Ain’t the fok’sle good enough for me?’

‘But does not association of that sort weaken your control over the men?’

‘_I’ve_ got no control, and don’t want none. The men’ll run if I sing out. And what more’s to be expected of sailors?’

‘It seems queer, though,’ said I, ‘since you undertake the work of a second mate, that you shouldn’t live aft. It must have been lonely eating for the skipper after Mr. Chicken died?’

‘I did live aft afore Mr. Chicken died,’ he exclaimed, biting his tobacco with temper, whilst his weather-stained face gathered a new shade of duskiness to the mounting of the blood into his head; ‘and then when the capt’n and me comes to be alone, he tarns to and finds out that I ain’t choice enough to sit down with--says I ain’t got the art of perlite eatin’, calls me a hog to my face, and tells me that my snout’s for the mess kid and not for knives and forks and crockery. Him!’ He turned his face to the rail and spat again, and looked at me with an expression of anger, but checked himself with violence, and pushed his hands into his breeches pockets with an irritable motion of his whole frame.

I considered that enough had been said; and though I had gained but little information, it was at least made clear to me that there was no love lost between Captain Braine and Mr. Lush. But further conversation would have been rendered impossible in any case, for just then a man struck eight bells on the main-deck, and a minute or two later the wheel was relieved, the captain arrived, and the carpenter went forward in a round-backed sulky walk, his legs bowed, his muscular arms hanging up and down without a swing, each bunch of his fingers curled like fish-hooks.

I had talked enough, and was weary of standing and walking; so, when I spied the skipper, I slipped off the poop and seated myself on a bench abreast of my sleeping companion, where I remained for half an hour, often gazing at her, my mind very busy with a hundred thoughts, foremost amongst which was the shuddering recollection of our late experiences and narrow escape, and deep thankfulness to God for His merciful preservation of us. The entrance of the captain’s servant--a young fellow named Wilkins, to be hereafter so called: a memorable figure in this startlingly eventful passage of my life which I am endeavouring to relate: a veal-faced, red-headed, shambling fellow of some two-and-twenty years, with white eyebrows and lashes, and a dim blue eye--the entrance, I say, of this man with a tray of tea-things aroused Miss Temple, who, after a brief bewildered stare at me, smiled, and sat upright.

‘There is always something new now,’ she exclaimed, ‘to look at when I open my eyes after sleeping. Yesterday it was the wreck; to-day it is this ship. What will it be to-morrow? Is there anything in sight, Mr. Dugdale?’

‘There was nothing when I left the deck half an hour ago,’ said I.

She had awakened with a slight flush of sleep in her face that greatly enriched her eyes; but the delicate glow quickly faded; she was speedily colourless as alabaster. She smoothed her hair and put on her hat, that she had removed when she lay down.

‘It is strange,’ she exclaimed in a low voice, ‘I should not seem able to endure feeling that I am not in a condition to instantly leave this vessel. It was so with me in the wreck. Even without my hat, I feel unready; and then, again, there is the sense of not being exactly as I was when I left the _Countess Ida_.’

The captain called through the skylight: ‘Wilkins, bring me some tea and a biscuit up here.’

‘Ay, ay, sir.’

‘Pray,’ said I, ‘when and where does the captain dine?’

‘I took his dinner to his cabin,’ responded the young fellow; ‘he mostly eats there. But now you’re here, I allow he’ll be a-jining of you.’

‘This is no meal for you, Miss Temple,’ said I, with a glance at the old teapot and the small plate of biscuits which furnished out the repast. ‘No milk--brown sugar--no butter, of course!’ Wilkins grinned whilst he poured out some tea into a cup. ‘You’ve had nothing to eat since we first came aboard.’

‘I want nothing,’ she answered.

‘Well, then, _I_ do,’ said I. ‘Captain Braine is quite right. Shipwreck doesn’t impair the appetite.’

‘There’ll be supper at seven, sir,’ said Wilkins.

‘And what do you call supper?’ I inquired.

‘Why,’ answered the fellow, ‘there’ll be the beef ye had this morning, piccalillis, bottled stout, biscuit after this here pattern, and cold currant dumplings.’

He then went up the companion steps with some biscuit and tea for the captain. I laughed out.

‘Not so good as the Indiaman’s dinner-table, Miss Temple, but better than the hull’s entertainment. We must wait till supper’s served. Meanwhile, I’ll blunt my appetite on a biscuit. Will you give me a cup of tea?’

It was genuine forecastle liquor, such as might have been boiled in a copper, of the hue of ink, and full of fragments of stalk. However, the mere looking at it was something to do, and we sat toying with our cups, making-pretend, as it were, to be drinking tea and talking.

‘I wonder,’ I exclaimed in the course of our conversation, ‘whether the cutter was picked up by one of the ships? If she lost both of them, will she have lived in the weather that followed? Anyway, the corvette is certain to make a long hunt for her, with the hope also of falling in with the Indiaman, for Sir Edward will think it possible that Keeling has his men aboard, and will want to make sure. I fear this business of the cutter may have led to such manœuvring on the part of the two ships as must render our falling-in with one or the other of them very unlikely.’

‘Oh, why do you say that?’ she cried.

‘It is but a surmise,’ said I; ‘anyhow, I heartily hope the cutter _has_ been picked up, if only for Colledge’s sake. The sudden loss of the lieutenant will have dreadfully scared him.’

‘I earnestly wish that Mr. Colledge may have been saved,’ said she with a faint glitter of temper in her gaze; ‘but I could wish ten times more earnestly that he had never been born, or that he had sailed in any other ship than the _Countess Ida_; for then I should not be here.’

‘Your aunt endeavoured to dissuade you.’

‘She did; and I am rightly served for not obeying her.’

‘You are very high-spirited, Miss Temple; it is your nature, and you cannot help yourself. You are a young lady to insist upon having your own way, and you always get it.’

‘Mr. Dugdale, you are too young to lecture me.’

‘How old do you think I am?’ said I.

‘Oh, about six-and-twenty,’ she answered with a slight incurious run of her eyes over me that recalled her manner in the Indiaman.

‘Well, if I am,’ said I, ‘it is a good solid age to achieve. There is room for enough experiences in six-and-twenty years to enable a young man to utter several very truthful observations to high-spirited young ladies who insist upon having their way, and then quarrel with everybody because their way is not exactly the road they wish to tread.’

She slightly knitted her fair brows and looked at me fixedly.

‘Mr. Dugdale,’ said she, ‘you would not have dared to talk to me like this on board the _Countess Ida_.’

‘I was afraid of you there.’

‘You _respected_ me there, you mean, and now--because’---- She came to a stop, with a little quivering at the extremities of her mouth.

‘I am no longer afraid of you, or, rather, I no longer respect you because you happen to be in this particular situation, which needs no explanation whatever: that is, I suppose, what you wish to say. But you misjudge me indeed. I was afraid of you on board the Indiaman, but I did not respect you; nay, my aversion was as cordial as could be possibly imagined in a man who thought you then, as he thinks you still, the handsomest woman he has ever seen in his life, or could ever have dreamt of. But that aversion is passing,’ I continued, watching with delight her marvellous gaze of astonishment and the warm flush that had overspread her face. ‘I am discovering that much of what excited my dislike and regret aboard the Indiaman is artificial, an insincerity in you. This afternoon, whilst you slept, I sat near you for half an hour, gazing at you. All expression of haughtiness had faded from your mouth: your countenance wore an air of exquisite placidity, of gentle kindness, of tender good nature. In short, Miss Temple, I saw you as you are, as your good angel knows you to be, as you have it in your power to appear.’ I sprang to my feet. ‘How shall we kill the blessed hours that lie before us? Only think, it is barely five o’clock.’

She gazed at me with an amazement that seemed to render her speechless; her face was on fire, and her throat blushed to where the collar of her dress circled it. ‘It will not do,’ I continued, ‘to attempt to murder time by talking, or it will come to your killing me instead of the hours. I’ll go and overhaul the late Mr. Chicken’s bedroom, or, rather, his effects. There _may_ be something to interest. Even the mouldiest backgammon board would be worth a million;’ and I made for the little hatch that conducted to our sleeping berths, leaving her motionless at the table.

Come, thought I, as I dropped into the ’tweendecks, a short spell of loneliness will do you good, my haughty beauty, by making you realise how it would be with you were you actually alone. This is the first of the homely thrusts I have been preparing for you, and I will not spare you less as I grow to love you more, taking my chance of your abhorring me, though it may not come to _that_ either.

I peeped into the berth that had been prepared for her, and found all the odds and ends which had encumbered it gone; there was a clean mattress on the bunk, and on top of it an old but comely rug and a couple of shawls; a small looking-glass dangled near the porthole. But what an interior for this delicately nurtured, high and mighty young lady of quality to lie in! No carpet, no chest of drawers, nothing beyond the looking-glass and a tin dish for washing in; in short, a mere marine cell, as like as might be to any little whitewashed room with grated window ashore in which a policeman would lock up a pick-pocket!

I entered my own berth. The boatswain’s and sailmaker’s stores were not here, and I found a ‘clean hold,’ as a sailor might say. In fact, all Chicken’s traps being about, caused the berth to present a much more hospitable aspect than the adjacent one afforded. I examined the books, but found most of them to consist of religious literature, as the captain had said, and the rest of them works on the nautical life. Though it was hard to reconcile a fancy of cards with the late Mr. Chicken’s character as portrayed by the skipper, I yet looked into a couple of chests in the hope of meeting with a pack; but neither cards nor any species of object calculated to divert did I come across; and growing weary of hunting, I returned to the cuddy.

I perceived or imagined an air of reproach in Miss Temple; but she had mastered her temper and astonishment.

‘There is nothing belonging to the late Mr. Chicken to entertain us,’ said I.

‘It surely does not signify, Mr. Dugdale. Do you suppose that I have the heart to play at cards or chess? Is not there more wind than there was? I will ask you to take me on deck. Something may be in sight, and it will not be dark for some time yet.’

I gave her my hand, and helped her up the little ladder. There was more wind, as she had said; the skysails had been furled and a studdingsail or two hauled down, and the little barque, with her yards almost square, was sweeping swiftly over the smooth waters, slightly heeling from side to side as she went. The foam in yeasty bubbles and soft cream-hued clouds went spinning and writhing from her bows into her wake, that ran like a path of coral sand over the darkling waters, now complexioned into lividness by the gloomy plain of vaporous sky. The crew were on the forecastle--it was well into the first dog-watch--lounging, sitting, yarning, and smoking. Amidst them I noticed Mr. Lush, leaning against the rail with a short sooty pipe in his mouth, the bowl of which was inverted. He was in his shirt sleeves, and he reclined with his arms folded upon his breast, apparently listening, in that dogged posture, to one of the sailors, who was reciting something with outstretched arm and a long forefinger, with which he seemed to be figuring diagrams upon the air. Upon the slope of the starboard cathead, coming into the deck, sat my friend Joe Wetherly, with a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles on his nose; he pored on a book with moving lips, from which he would expel at intervals great clouds of smoke through a pipe betwixt his teeth. So small was the barque, so seemingly close at hand the forecastle to the break of the poop, that even such minute details as these were perfectly visible to me.

Captain Braine stood near the wheel. He continuously stared at us, but did not shift his attitude nor offer to address us. I swept the sea-line, but to no purpose.

‘How sickeningly wearisome has that bare horizon grown to me!’ exclaimed Miss Temple, with a shuddering sigh; ‘it has just the sort of monotony that would speedily drive me crazy. I am sure; not the wearisomeness of four walls, nor the tiresomeness of a single eternal glimpse of unchanging country to be had through a window; no! there is a mockery in it which you do not find in the most insipid, colourless scene on land. It is not, and still it always _is_, the same. It recedes to your pursuit, yet it is unalterable, and how cruelly barren is it of suggestions!’

‘Yet a sight of the Indiaman,’ said I, ‘should develop whatever of the picturesque may be hidden in that tiresome girdle.’

‘Ah, yes!’ she answered; ‘but we are now running away from our chances. How swiftly this boat sails! If the Indiaman is behind us, we shall see no more of her.’

‘Do not let us depress each other with talk of this kind,’ said I; ‘let me give you my arm, and we will stroll a little.’

We had been on deck about twenty minutes, when the captain, who had continued to steadfastly gaze at us in a most extraordinary ruminating way, crossed the deck.

‘Pray, sir,’ said he, ‘could I trust you to keep a lookout for me if I went below for a short spell?’

‘I will do so with pleasure.’

‘D’ye know what orders to give, if anything requiring orders should happen?’

‘Why,’ said I, smiling, ‘there are a good many orders going at sea, you know, captain. Figure a situation, and I will see if I can recollect the routine.’

He stared at me musingly with his dead black eyes, and then said: ‘Well, suppose the breeze freshens with a dark look to wind’ard, and I’m below and asleep, and have left ye no instructions; what would you do?’

‘Call you,’ said I.

‘And quite right, too,’ he cried, with a vehement nod of approval, and a glance at Miss Temple, as if he would have her participate in his satisfaction. ‘But put me out of the question, and allow that you’ve got to act for yourself.’

‘Why, Captain Braine,’ I exclaimed, ‘though my time at sea was brief, I am no longshoreman. Such a question as yours means merely the first letter in the marine alphabet.’

‘I ain’t so sure of that,’ said he, with his fixed regard.

‘I admit,’ continued I, ‘that I have never been shipmate with a fore-and-aft rigged mizzenmast; but if it’s merely a question of shortening sail, why, what else under the moon is to be done than to take in your studdingsails and clew up your royals and haul down your flying jib, and then let go your foretopgallant halliards, and haul down your light staysails’--and so I rambled on, winding up with, ‘I am leaving your after-canvas untouched, because it is already in, you see; whilst as to your jibs and staysails, I assume of course that they are set.’

He lifted his hand. ‘Thank’ee,’ said he; ‘I shan’t be long;’ and down he went.

‘You will surely believe _now_ that he is mad!’ said Miss Temple with anxiety, but softly, for the fellow at the wheel stood near, and I had seen a grin crumple up his features to the skipper’s question.

‘He may want me to serve him as a mate,’ said I, laughing.

‘You will do nothing of the kind, I hope,’ she exclaimed, as we fell to pacing the deck afresh.

‘I will do anything that may help me to see you safe,’ said I.

‘But cannot you perceive, Mr. Dugdale, that if he believes you fit to serve him as a mate, as you call it, he may prevent you from leaving his ship by declining to communicate with passing vessels?’

‘That is true,’ said I.

‘I am certain,’ she cried, squeezing my arm in the energy of her emotion, ‘that he has some design in his mind to make you serve him. Why should he have teased you when we came, poor miserable creatures! fresh from the wreck, with inquiries about your knowledge of navigation? Oh, beware of him! He may not be quite mad, but he may be as wicked as the worst of his men.’

‘We must wait,’ said I, for her conjectures were quite reasonable enough to prove disturbing. ‘But after all,’ I cried, brightening up to the new idea that possessed me, ‘if we are to sail to the Mauritius with him’----

‘No!’ she exclaimed; ‘that is not to be dreamt of.’

‘Yet listen, I entreat you. If it is our uncomfortable doom to remain in this barque until she reaches her port, I do not know but that the captain would be very honestly in the right in expecting me to work my passage--that is to say, to help him by keeping a lookout, and by serving him in other ways which may be possible to me.’

‘Do not dream of sailing to the Mauritius!’ she cried impetuously; ‘we must either soon meet with the Indiaman or return home.’

I could not forbear a smile at her imperious _we_, as though whatever she did I must do.

‘Ay, that is what we want,’ I exclaimed; ‘but then if we don’t fall in with the Indiaman nor with a vessel homeward bound’----

‘Absurd! Dozens of ships are to be met with every day sailing home to England from some part or other of the world. The idea of remaining in this vessel is not to be entertained for an instant. It would be intolerable enough for me even to make the comparatively short passage home, destitute as I am of everything; but to leisurely proceed _all_ the way to the Mauritius---- Oh, be very careful, Mr. Dugdale. I beg you not to know anything at all about navigation and the duties of a sailor.’

‘I can’t do that,’ I answered; ‘I have loaded my gun and must stick to it; but I promise you I will put no more shot in it.’

She eyed me with great impatience and warmth, as though provoked by my answer: but she held her peace, and presently our conversation went to other matters.

Shortly before six o’clock the sky cleared somewhat to windward. The wide pall of leaden cloud lifted there, as though it were some huge carpet a corner of which was being rolled up, and there looked to flow a very lagoon of pure blue ether, moist and rich with the evening shadow, into the space betwixt the rim of the sea and the edge of the cloud. A clearer, more penetrating light broadened out; and going to the companion hatch, I took the telescope that lay in brackets there and carefully searched the horizon. But the sea washed bare to the sky on all sides.

I did not observe that the men gathered together on the forecastle seemed to notice the captain’s absence, though I expected they would come to stare a bit when the fellow who stood at the wheel should go forward and tell them that I had been acting as mate of the watch. For my part this queer duty coming upon me made the whole experience more wild and improbable to my imagination than had been any other feature of it since we quitted the Indiaman. Never was there such a forcing of adventures, as it were, upon a man. It was like dreaming to reflect that a little time ago I was a passenger, an easy-going, smoking, drinking, chess-playing young fellow, without a care, with plenty of clothes and money enough in my cabin, and that now I was a half-starved, shipwrecked wretch, without the value of a straw in the shape of possessions, outside of what I stood up in and had in my pockets, keeping a lookout as though, faith, I was some poor, struggling, hungry second mate, newly enlarged from an odious term of apprenticeship! like dreaming, I say, to think that a little time ago the young lady by my side was a reserved, disdainful creature, with scarcely a word betwixt her lips to throw at me, and that now she could not speak of her future without making me a sharer in it, that she could not see enough of me, nor have my arm too close for her hand; whilst in point of destitution she, the most richly clad of the Indiaman’s lady passengers, she, who had seemed to me to appear in a new dress nearly every day, was out and away more beggared than I; for so far as I was concerned there was always the barque’s slop chest to come upon; or, failing that, there would be jackets and breeches and ‘housewives’ enough forward to serve my turn if the push grew severe; whereas Miss Temple was as badly off as if she had been cast away upon a desert island!