CHAPTER XXVI

I AM QUESTIONED

The captain did not again return on deck. At six o’clock Mr. Lush’s white jacket was forked up to him through the forecastle hatch: he slipped it on and came aft to relieve the watch; but though he looked about a little for the skipper, I could not find in his wooden face that he made anything of not perceiving him. By seven o’clock the sky had cleared; the wide stretch of vapour which had all day long obscured the sky had settled away down beyond the southern rim, and the soft violet of the tropic evening heaven was made beautiful by spaces at wide intervals of a delicate filigree-work of white cloud, dainty and fine to the eye as frost on a meadow. The setting sun glowed in the west like a golden target, rayless, palpitating, and a cone-shaped wake of flame hung under him. There was a pleasant whipping of wind over the sea, a merry air that whitened the heads of the ripples, and it blew sweet and warm.

Lush had loosed the skysails again and sent the royal studdingsails up, and the barque went nimbly floating through it in the resemblance of some golden-tinctured fabric of silver hull and sails of cloth of silver; indeed, from the point of view of the space of deck abaft the wheel, she showed like some fairy creation in that atmosphere that was brimful of scarlet light, and upon that sapphire plain whose tender long-drawn undulations seemed to wave a faint golden hue through, the blue of the brine, as though there were dyes of a westering sun-colour rising from the heart of the deep, and then subsiding.

On looking through the skylight I perceived Wilkins placing supper on the table. This was an unusual meal at sea, at least aboard of a homely trader of the pattern of the _Lady Blanche_, and was a distinct illustration in its way, to my recollections of seafaring life, of the odd character of the man who commanded the barque. He came out of his cabin as we seated ourselves, giving Miss Temple a grotesque bow before taking his place.

‘Sorry, mem,’ said he, casting his slow eye over the table, ‘that there’s nothing choicer in the way of victuals to offer you. I find that the wine brought aboard from the wreck is a middling good quality of liquor, and it is to be saved for you, mem. Wilkins, open a bottle, and give it to the lady. Pity that shore-going folks who take interest in the nautical calling don’t turn to and invent something better for the likes of me than salt pork and beef and biscuit, and peas which are only fit to load a blunderbuss with. There have been times when a singular longing’s come upon me for a cut of prime sirloin and a floury potato, as Jack says. But the sea-life’s a hard calling, look at it from which end of the ship ye may. How did you get on in your watch on deck, Mr. Dugdale?’ he added with a gaunt smile, in which I could not distinguish the least complexion of mirth.

‘There was nothing to be done,’ said I, working away at a piece of salt beef, for I was exceedingly hungry.

‘But ye’d have known what to do if there had been?’ said he.

Miss Temple’s glance admonished me to be wary.

‘Oh, I am no sailor,’ said I, ‘in the sense that you and Mr. Lush are sailors.’

‘Not Mr. Lush!’ he cried, elevating his forefinger and staring hard at me past it. ‘Mr. Lush, as you term him, is a hog on two legs. Let him go on all fours, and there’s ne’er an old sow under a longboat that wouldn’t take him to her heart as one of her long-lost children. Such manners, mem!’ he continued, addressing Miss Temple, whilst with upturned eyes and raised hands he counterfeited an air of disgust; ‘when he ate, you could hear the smack of his lips fore and aft. He’d make nothing of laying hold of a bit of cold beef and gnawing upon it as a dawg might, head first on one side and then on t’other; and you’d find yourself listening to hear him growl, if you looked at him. And then his language! I’ve been eating by myself pretty nigh since Chicken died, but it’s entertainment for me to have company;’ and he bestowed another bow upon each of us.

‘You will not find the manners of a nobleman in a plain ship’s carpenter,’ said I, thankful to believe that he had forgotten the subject of my sea-going qualifications. But I was mistaken. He gazed at me with a steadfastness that was absolutely confusing, whilst he seemed lost in deep thought, then said:

‘I’m not going to regard you, Mr. Dugdale, as a tip-top sailor, of course. Ye’ve knocked off too long; but it’ll all come back very soon.’

‘Mr. Dugdale was at sea for only two years,’ said Miss Temple. ‘It would be unreasonable to expect anyone to know much of a calling in that time.’

‘Don’t you believe _that_, mem,’ he exclaimed. ‘After twelve months of it, there was but little left for me to larn--proper, I mean, to fit me to sarve as able seaman aboard anything afloat, from a hoy to a line-of-battle ship. What don’t ye know now, Mr. Dugdale?’

He somewhat softened his voice as he said this, and a queer sort of yearning expression entered his unwinking stare.

‘Oh, much, captain, much,’ I answered smiling, yet feeling somewhat bothered betwixt these questions and Miss Temple’s glances.

‘You could put a ship about, I suppose.’

‘Well, I might do that,’ I replied; ‘but there would be a chance of my getting her into irons, though.’

‘You’d be able to know when to shorten sail anyway, and what orders to give. You told me ye could take a star?’

‘Did I?’ I exclaimed.

‘Certainly you did, sir,’ he cried.

‘I do not recollect,’ said Miss Temple.

‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, with another of his mirthless grins, ‘the lady’s afraid of your knowing too much, sir. I don’t mean no offence, but there’s a forecastle saying that all the male monkeys ’ud talk if it wasn’t for their sweethearts, who advise them to hold their jaw lest they should be put upon.’

Miss Temple’s face changed into stone, after one withering glance at the man, whose countenance remained distorted with a smile.

‘Some of Jack’s sayings are first class,’ he went on. ‘Yes, ye told me you could take a star. Can you find the latitude by double altitudes?’

‘A few trials would recall the trick, I daresay,’ I answered.

‘And of course you know how to find the longitude by lunar observations?’

‘Pray excuse me, Captain Braine,’ said I; ‘but what, may I inquire, is your motive in asking these questions?’

He eyed me fixedly for some moments, and then silently nodded his head three or four times. Miss Temple seemed to shrink slightly as she watched him.

‘Mr. Dugdale,’ said he very slowly, ‘on your giving me to understand that you had sarved aboard an Indiaman, I was willing to receive you and the lady aboard my ship. When you came aboard, you told me that you understood navigation. Didn’t ye?’

I felt the blood in my cheek as I answered: ‘I have some recollection of speaking to that effect.’

‘Then why d’ye want to go and try to make out _now_ that ye know nothing about it?’

‘I am trying to do nothing of the kind,’ said I, assuming an air of dignity and resentment, though I feared it was good for very little. ‘You have questioned me, sir, and now I ask _you_ a question. I have a right to an answer, seeing how you expect that I should rapidly and fluently reply to you.’

‘I’ll be talking to you afore long,’ he said, bestowing another succession of dark mysterious nods upon me.

‘Captain Braine,’ cried Miss Temple, breaking with an air of consternation out of the cold, contemptuous resentment that had made marble of her face, ‘you have rescued us from a condition of dreadful distress, and I have your promise that you will not lose an opportunity to transfer us to the first ship you meet that is homeward bound, providing we do not shortly fall in with the _Countess Ida_.’

‘I ha’n’t broke my promise yet, have I?’ he replied, rounding slowly upon her and staring.

‘I can only repeat,’ she continued, preserving her expression of dismay, ‘that any sum of money you may choose to ask’----

‘I know all about that, mem,’ he interrupted, but not offensively, and with a gesture that was almost bland. He then leisurely turned to me. ‘You gave me to believe this morning, sir, that you was acquainted with navigation?’

‘And what then?’ I exclaimed impatiently.

‘I hope that you didn’t deceive me,’ he said with a dark look.

‘You shall have the full truth when I know your motive in examining me in this fashion,’ said I hotly, ‘and not before.’

But immediately after I had spoken I was sensible of my folly in losing my temper. Talk as we might, vapour as we would, we were in this man’s power: in the power of a man who was absolutely unintelligible as a character whether sane or mad, and the girl’s and my own safety might wholly depend upon our judgment and tact. He gazed at me with eyes whose expression seemed to grow more and more malignant, though, God knows, this might have been my fancy, since I was in the humour at the moment to figure all things very blackly.

‘Understand me,’ I exclaimed, wholly changing my manner, and speaking in a softened tone; ‘if I can be of service to you in any direction, you have but to command me. I owe you my own and this lady’s life; and though it is an obligation beyond my power of discharging in full, yet it must be my duty and happiness to diminish it in any direction I am equal to.’

‘We will before long talk together, sir,’ said he, and then fell silent, nor did he again open his lips during the seven or eight minutes in which we continued sitting together at that table.

I was exceedingly puzzled and troubled by what had passed. What did this captain mean by his dark mysterious nods, by his saying that he would talk to me presently, by his insistence in ascertaining the extent of my nautical knowledge? It was possible, indeed, that being the only navigator aboard his vessel, he might consider himself in serious need of some one to take his place if he should fall sick. But his behaviour was scarcely reconcilable with this plain clear want, and it seemed certain that there was more going to his speech and manner than the desire that I should fill the part of mate to him.

It was a fair, warm, delightful night, rich with stars, and soothing with the dew-sweetened wind that blew with steady freshness over the quarter, running the pale shape of the barque over the dark waters, as though she were some wreath of mist that must presently dissolve. Miss Temple and I, sometimes walking, sometimes sitting on the skylight, held to the deck till a late hour. She abhorred the thought of withdrawing to the cabin allotted to her; and short as my sleep had been since the hour of my quitting the Indiaman’s side, I was as little willing as she to quit the silence and coolness and beauty of the open night for the confinement of a small hot berth.

The captain had charge of the deck from eight to twelve; but he only once approached us to say that a lantern containing an end of candle had been placed in each of our berths; ‘and I will ask you both,’ he added, ‘to mind your fire, for we’re full up with dry light goods in the steerage.’ He then returned to the side of the deck he had crossed from, and did not again offer to approach us.

You will suppose that the girl and I could talk of nothing but the captain’s intentions, the probable condition of his intellect, and the like.

‘He may refuse to part with me,’ said I, ‘and yet be perfectly willing to send you on board of the first homeward-bound ship we sight. What then, Miss Temple?’

‘I could not travel alone. It is not endurable that such a man as Captain Braine should compel you, against your wishes, to remain with him! How could he do so? How could he compel you to take a star, as he calls it, whatever that may mean; and to keep watch?’ She sighed deeply. ‘Alas! my language is fast becoming that of the common sailor. To think of me talking to you about taking a star and keeping watch!’

‘And why not? Jack’s is a noble tongue. Omit the oaths, and there is no dialect more swelling and poetic than that of the sea.’

‘I detest it because it is forced upon me. An odious and dreadful experience obliges me to think and speak in it. Otherwise, I might rather like it. But tell me now, Mr. Dugdale, surely this captain could not compel you to remain with him?’

This led to a deal of talk. I did my utmost to reassure her; I exhorted her to bear in mind that whilst we were on board the barque, we were literally at the mercy of the skipper, who, down to the present moment, had certainly treated us with great humanity, though his behaviour and conversation in the main were undeniably of a lunatic sort. I bitterly condemned myself for losing my temper, and I entreated her to be patient, to control all resentment that the man might excite by purposed or involuntary insult, not to doubt that he would put her on board a ship proceeding home, and to leave me to play a part of my own that should keep us together.

‘For,’ said I, ‘since fate, cruel to you, but not to me, Miss Temple, has placed you so far in my keeping, I must be jealous of all interference down to the very termination of our adventure.’

‘I wish for no other companion,’ she exclaimed in a low voice; ‘my mother will thank you, Mr. Dugdale.’

‘And, please God, your mother shall,’ said I, ‘trifling as may be my claims upon her gratitude. But however my merits may turn out before we again sight Old England, I shall be abundantly satisfied if I believe that you think of me with more kindness than you did on board the _Countess Ida_.’

‘Mr. Dugdale, I thought of no one on board the _Countess Ida_. But let us avoid that subject--you have already been very plain-spoken.’

She ceased. I made no answer, and for some time we paced the deck in silence, harking then back again to the old topic of the captain’s intentions, the whereabouts of the Indiaman, and so on, and so on. By-and-by I looked at my watch; the dial-plate showed clearly by the starlight. It was eleven o’clock; and as I looked the ship’s bell rang out six chimes, which came floating down again in echoes out of the tremorless pallid concavities on high. Miss Temple was still most reluctant to leave the deck.

‘I am thinking of Mr. Chicken,’ she exclaimed.

‘Chicken’s ghost, like a hen’s egg, is laid,’ said I. ‘Besides, what remains of him will be all about my bunk.’

‘Oh for the Indiaman’s saloon,’ she cried, ‘for my dear aunt, for old Captain Keeling! How welcome would be a sight of even the most intolerable of the passengers, say Mr. Johnson; even that horrid little creature with the eye-glass, Miss Hudson’s admirer.’

‘I fear I am tolerated for the same reason that would render Mr. Johnson endurable to you.’

‘No!’ she answered quickly and warmly; ‘you are incessantly personal. I do not like it.’

‘Suffer me to escort you to your cabin?’

She lingered yet, turning her face to the skies.

‘How rich are those stars! Such lovely jewels are never to be seen in the English heavens. Mark how the meteors score the dark spaces between the lights with scars and paths of diamond dust! Oh that some gigantic shadowy finger would shape itself up there pointing downwards, to let us know where the _Countess Ida_ is.’

She rose from the skylight with a long tremulous sigh, and passed her hand through my arm that I might conduct her below. For an instant I hung in the wind.

‘Why do you wait? I am now ready,’ said she.

‘I am debating within myself whether I should offer to stand watch to-night--the captain might expect me to do so.’

‘I do believe you desire that I should think you as mad as he is,’ she exclaimed, exerting pressure enough on my arm to start me towards the poop-ladder; ‘you shall do nothing of the sort with my consent. If you wish to resume your old vocation, Mr. Dugdale, pray wait until this adventure is ended.’

‘Anyway, we must bid him good-night,’ said I; and with that I called out to him. He answered: ‘Good-night, Mr. Dugdale; good-night to you, mem. If there’s anything a-missing which the _Lady Blanche_ can supply let me know, and you shall have it.’

‘You’re extremely good, and we’re very much obliged to you,’ said I.

‘Good-night, Captain Braine,’ called Miss Temple in her rich voice; and down we went.

The cabin lamp showed a small light. Miss Temple waited here whilst I went below for one of the two lanterns which the captain had told me I should find in our berths. I was obliged to kindle a sulphur match, and I remember cursing the tardy operation of obtaining a light whilst I stood hammering away with flint and steel, injuring my knuckles, and wishing the tinder-box at the deuce. I found the lanterns, and left one alight in Miss Temple’s cabin, and carried my own, also alight, into the cuddy. Miss Temple’s eyes sparkled to the glare as I approached her, and her face might have been a spirit’s for its whiteness in that faint illumination vexed with shadows as the lantern swayed to the light rolling of the barque.

‘I wish I could sleep here,’ said she.

‘You will be equally comfortable below,’ said I; ‘and what is better, quite private.’

‘Did you see any rats?’

‘None.’

She took my arm with a firm clasp, and hardly seemed willing to release me at the hatch, though the aperture was too narrow to admit of our descending together. When we had gained the lower deck, she again seized my arm and stood staring and hearkening.

‘Oh, Mr. Dugdale,’ she cried, ‘it is very lonely down here!’

‘Yes; but you are not alone. You must have courage. I would rather you should be next me than overhead next the captain.’

Yet, as I spoke, my heart was full of pity for her. It was indeed lonely, as she had said, with a sense of imprisonment besides, all that way down, thinking of where we stood, I mean, with reference to the poop. The stowed cases in the forepart seemed to stir as though to some internal throes to the weak light that swung in my hand; the atmosphere was charged with an unpleasant smell of cargo and the mingled fumes of a ship’s hold; and there was something of the heat of an oven also in the air that felt to rest with a sort of weight upon the head, due perhaps to the fancy begotten by the nearness of the upper deck or ceiling as you may term it. Small straining noises stole upon the ear from round about in stealthy notes, as though they were giants below moving warily. I say I was full of concern for the poor girl. Somehow the misery of her condition had not before affected me as it now did.

‘It will not last long. It will be a thing of the past very shortly: meanwhile, keep up your heart, and trust me as your protector whilst God leaves me a hand to lift,’ I exclaimed with a tenderness of which I was insensible until a little later on, when the tones of my voice recurred to me in memory.

She looked at me as though she were about to speak, yet said nothing; and releasing my arm, she stepped to her cabin door and peeped in.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ said I, keeping at a respectful distance.

She peered awhile, and then answered: ‘I think not. But that candle will not last long, and I shall be in darkness. Or if I should extinguish it, how am I to light it again?’

‘If you want a light,’ said I, ‘knock on the bulkhead. I shall hear you, and will answer by knocking. But it already draws on for twelve o’clock. The dawn will be breaking at five or thereabouts. I trust you will sleep. You greatly need rest.’

I removed my cap to kiss her hand, and met her gaze, that was fixed full of wistfulness upon me. ‘Good-night, Miss Temple,’ said I. She entered her cabin looking as though her heart was too full for speech, and closed the door.

I was now feeling exceedingly weary, yet, as I feared that she might need me, or, in some nervous fit, knock if it were but to know that I was awake, I filled my pipe, got into Mr. Chicken’s bunk, and sat smoking. I cannot express the peculiar character of the stillness down here. It was very extraordinarily accentuated by the sounds which at intervals penetrated it: such as the muffled jar of the rudder working upon its post, the dim wash of water, startlingly close at hand, along with the faint seething noise of the barque’s wake hissing within arm’s reach, as it seemed, and coming and going upon the hearing fitfully. The suit of oilskins against the bulkhead swayed to the heave of the fabric, and they resembled the body of a man who had hanged himself by the nail from which they dangled. There was a pair of sea-boots up in a corner with a dropsical bulging out about the foot of them in the part where a man’s bunions would come, and they showed so very much as if they had just been drawn off the legs of Mr. Chicken, that they grew ghastly presently, and to relieve my imagination, I directed my eyes at other objects.

I sat smoking and full of thought. My eyelids were as of lead, yet my mind continued impertinently active. The horrors we had escaped from lay like the shadow of a thundercloud upon my spirits; the oppression was too violent to suffer the continuance of any emotion of exultation over our deliverance. Dark and dismal fancies possessed me. I thought of Captain Braine as a man whose reason was unsound, and who was capable of playing me some devilish trick; I thought of the coarse and surly carpenter, and of the charge of murder hinted against him by the skipper. I thought of the convicts and of the mutineer in the forecastle, and then my raven-like imagination going to Miss Temple, I reflected that I was unarmed, that I had no weapon about me but a knife, that must prove of very little use should it come to my having to make a fight of it for hers and my own life. Surely, I mused, old Chicken will not have come to sea without some instrument of self-defence, be it blunderbuss, pistol, or cutlass.

I took an earnest view of the interior. There was a locker against the bulkhead that divided Miss Temple’s cabin from mine; I had incuriously opened and looked into it when searching for something to divert ourselves with, being by the time I had come to that locker too tired to continue overhauling the dead man’s effects. Besides this receptacle there were two chests of clothes and other matters along with a bagful of things, and a shelf over the bunk filled with odds and ends. There was still about an hour of candle-light in the lantern. I raised the lid of the locker, and found within a truly miscellaneous ‘raffle’ of objects, as a sailor would term it: charts, slippers, sextant in case, a number of tobacco pipes, bundles of papers, and I know not what besides. At the bottom, in the left-hand corner, was a small canvas bag very weighty for its size. I drew it out, and found about forty pounds in gold inside it, with three Australian one-pound notes, dark with thumbing and pocketing, and a five-pound note scarcely distinguishable for dirt and creases. I replaced the bag; and coming to the other end of the locker, working my way to it through a very rag-and-bottle shop of queer gatherings, I met with the object that I was longing for: to wit, a heavy, long, double-barrelled pistol, with a couple of nipples and a ramrod, and a butt massive enough to bring an ox to earth with. There were a parcel of bullets, and a small brown powder-flask full in the piece of canvas in which the pistol was wrapped; but for some time I could not find any caps. Without them, the pistol would not be of the least use, and my satisfaction yielded to mortification as I continued to probe into the locker without result. I was about to abandon the quest in despair, when my fingers touched a circular metal box like to those which used to contain paste for the polishing of boots; I fished it up, and was mighty glad to find it filled with caps. Come, thought I, if difficulties are to happen, I am better off now than I was half an hour ago, anyhow.

All this time there had been no noise next door, and I could but hope that Miss Temple was sleeping. I carefully put the pistol and its little furniture into the foot of my bunk, and pulling off my coat and waistcoat, and removing my shoes, I vaulted on to Mr; Chicken’s mattress, blew out the candle in the lantern and stretched my length. It was hard upon two o’clock, however, before I fell asleep. The scuttle or porthole was abreast of the bunk, and the black disc of it framed the low-lying stars of the horizon as they slided up and down to the lift and fall of the hull. My thoughts went out to the great dark ocean, and shivers chased me, hot as the cabin was, as I lay reflecting upon the fire and explosion of the wreck, and upon how it would have been with us if Captain Braine, having taken a view of the hull, had proceeded and left us to our fate. The noises which violated the singular stillness down in that part of the ship where we lay, and which had rendered me somewhat uneasy at first, now proved lulling as I lay hearkening to them, growing drowsier and drowsier. There was a slumberous monotony in the creaking and jarring of the rudder, something soothing in the dim hissing of the wake dying out, and then seething afresh like the noise of champagne in a glass held to the ear, as the frame of the barque slightly soared and sank in delicate floating movements upon the under-run of the dark swell. Perhaps by this time to-morrow we may be aboard a ship homeward-bound, I remember thinking: and that was the last of my thoughts that night, for I immediately afterwards sank into a sound sleep.