CHAPTER XXVIII

I QUESTION WETHERLY

It had now become so much one thing on top of another with us, and everything happening in a moment, so to speak, too: first our being left on the wreck all in a breath as it were: then our being picked up by this barque without the dimmest prospect, as my instincts advised me, of our falling in with the _Countess Ida_ this side of Bombay: then our destitute condition aboard a craft whose skipper’s sanity I was now honestly beginning to distrust, and whose people, if he did not lie, were for the most part a gang of scoundrels: then this sudden narrow shave of being boarded by above a score of miscreants whose undoubted hope was to seize the _Lady Blanche_ and to use her in the room of their own extinguished brig; I say it was so much one thing on top of another--a catalogue of adventures scarcely conceivable in these safe-going days of the ocean mailboat, though real enough and in one way or another frequent enough in my time, I mean in the time of this narrative--that I protest something of the dismay which possessed Miss Temple visited me, though I struggled hard in the direction of a composed face, as we talked over the incident of the morning, and took a view of the singular staring figure who had charge of the barque, and directed our eyes at the crew, all hands of whom hung about forward, briskly yarning, as I might suppose, about the Spanish longboat’s attempt (and with God knows what sympathy, I would think, as I peered at the groups), or as we sent our eager gaze into the blue and brilliant ocean distance in search of any little leaning flake of white that might flatter us with promise of escape from our disagreeable situation.

‘I have fully and immovably formed my opinion on two points,’ said Miss Temple to me as we continued to pace the deck together for some half hour after the boat had disappeared astern: ‘one is, that Captain Braine is mad; and the other that he is firmly bent on making you serve him as his mate.’

‘I own that I now believe he is madder than I first suspected,’ I answered. ‘His manner and language to you just now were extraordinary. But as to his employing me as mate--I think this: if the man is crazy, he may easily go wrong in his navigation; if we sight nothing that will carry us home, we must obviously stick to the barque, and her safety, therefore, is ours; consequently, it is desirable, I think, that I should know what her skipper is doing with her from day to day; and this I can contrive by consenting to oblige him with taking sights.’

‘I see what you mean,’ she exclaimed thoughtfully. ‘I had not taken that view; but it is a cruel one to entertain; it implies our remaining on board until--until---- Oh, Mr. Dugdale! this sort of imprisonment for the next two or three months is not to be borne.’

‘Anyway,’ said I, ‘you now understand that our very safety demands we should know where that fellow is carrying his ship. If, then, he should request me to shoot the sun as we call it, you will not be vexed by my compliance?’

‘Who am I, Mr. Dugdale, that you should trouble yourself about my opinion?’

‘You can make yourself felt,’ said I, smiling; ‘I should consider your eyes matchless in their power to subdue. There is a little passage in Shakespeare that very exquisitely fits my theory of you.’

‘I would rather not hear it,’ she answered, with a slight curl of her lip and a faint tinge of rose in her cheeks. ‘You once applied to me a sentence from Shakespeare that was very unflattering.’

‘What was it?’

‘You compared my complexion to the white death that one of Shakespeare’s girls talks about.’

‘I remember. I am astonished that your aunt should have repeated to you what she overheard by stealth.’

‘I do not understand,’ she exclaimed, firing up.

‘She was behind me when I made that quotation, and I was unconscious of her presence. She should have respected my ignorance. I meant no wrong,’ I went on, pretending to get into a passion. ‘Your complexion is pale, and I sought to illustrate it to my little friend Saunders by an expression of striking nobility and beautiful dignity. If ever I have the fortune to find myself in your aunt’s company, I shall give her my mind on this business. How am I to know but that her repeating what she had heard me let fall excited in you the disgust I found in your treatment of me?’

She cooled down as I grew hot.

‘The extravagance of your language shocks me,’ she exclaimed, but with very little temper in her voice. ‘Disgust? You have no right to use that word. You were always very courteous to me on board the _Countess Ida_.’

‘Am I less so here?’ said I, still preserving an air of indignation.

‘Do not let us quarrel,’ she said gently, with such a look of sweetness in her eyes as I should have thought their dark and glowing depths incapable of.

‘If we quarrel, it will not be my fault,’ said I, disguising myself with my voice, whilst I looked seawards that my face might not betray me.

At that moment the captain called out my name: ‘Can I have a word with you, sir?’ he cried along the short length of poop, standing as he was at the wheel, whilst we were conversing at the fore-end of the raised deck.

‘With pleasure,’ I answered.

‘I shall go into the cabin,’ said Miss Temple; ‘it is too hot here. You will come and tell me what he wants.’

I waited until she had descended the ladder, and then strolled over to the captain, determined to let him know by my careless air that whatever I did for him he must regard as an obligation, or as an expression of my gratitude; but that I was not to be commanded. I believed I could witness an expression of embarrassment in his fixed regard that I had not before noticed in him. He eyed me as though lost in thought, and I waited.

‘Would you object,’ said he, ‘to ascertain our latitude at noon to-day?’

‘Not in the least.’

He seemed to grow a little brighter. ‘And I should feel obliged,’ he continued, ‘if you’d work out the longitude.’

‘With pleasure,’ I said. I looked at my watch. ‘But I have no sextant.’

‘I have a couple,’ he exclaimed; ‘I will lend you one;’ and down he went for it with a fluttered demeanour of eagerness.

I lingered till I supposed he had entered his cabin, then put my head into the skylight and called softly to Miss Temple, who was seated almost directly beneath for the air there: ‘He wishes me to take an observation with him.’

‘What is that?’ she answered, also speaking softly and turning up her face.

‘I am to shoot the sun--you know, Miss Temple.’

‘Oh, pray, contrive to make some error--commit some blunder to make him suppose’---- She checked herself, and I heard the captain say that it was very hot as he came to the companion steps.

In a few moments he arrived on deck, hugging a brace of sextant cases to his heart. He told me to choose; I took the one nearest to me, perceived that the instrument was almost new, and as it was now hard upon the hour of noon, applied it to my eye, the captain standing alongside of me ogling the sun likewise. I could see the men forward, waiting for the skipper to make eight bells, staring their hardest at the now unusual spectacle to them of two sextants at work. For my part, I should have been shocked by the weakness of my memory if I had not known what to do. During the two years I had spent at sea I was thoroughly grounded in navigation--such as it was in those days; and as I stood screwing the sun down to the horizon, the whole practice of the art, so far as my education in it went, came back to me as freshly as though I had been taking sights ever since.

We made eight bells. Mr. Lush came aft to relieve the deck, and I went below with Captain Braine to work out the barque’s position.

I smiled at Miss Temple as I entered the cuddy; she watched me eagerly, and the movement of her lips seemed to say, ‘Don’t be long.’ In fact, her face had that meaning; and I gave her a reassuring nod ere turning to follow the captain into his berth. The apartment was small and cheerful, plainly stocked with the customary details of a humble skipper’s sea bedroom; a cot, a small table, a cushioned locker, a few mathematical instruments, a little hanging shelf of strictly nautical books, and so on. His chronometer was a good one, handsome for those days, of a quality one would hardly expect to find in a little trading-barque of the pattern of this _Lady Blanche_. There was a bag of charts in a corner, and a small chart of the world lay half unrolled upon the table, with a bit of the Atlantic Ocean visible exhibiting the skipper’s ‘pricking’ or tracing of his course down to the preceding day.

‘Here’s ink and paper, sir,’ said he; ‘sit ye down, and let’s see if we can tally.’

I was always a tolerably quick hand at figures, and had soon completed my calculations, feeling as though I was at sea again in sober professional earnest. The captain worked with extraordinary gravity; his singular eyes overhung the paper without a wink, and his yellow countenance, with his blue chops and chin, wore the melancholy of a mute’s face, mixed with an indefinable quality of distress, as though his mental efforts were putting him to physical pain. We agreed to a second in our latitude, but differed in our longitude by something over seven miles.

‘You’ll be in the right, sir--you’ll be in the right!’ he cried, smiting the table with his fist. ‘It is clear you know the ropes, Mr. Dugdale. I’ll abide by your reckonings. And now I want ye to do me a further sarvice.’

‘What is that, captain?’ said I.

‘Well, ye may reckon, of course, that I can write,’ he answered; ‘but I never was topweight with my pen, as Jack says, nor, for the matter of that, was Chicken much of a hand. There was some words which he was always making a foul hawse of. Now, what I want ye to do, Mr. Dugdale, is to keep my log for me.’

‘All this,’ said I carelessly, yet watching him with attention, ‘is practically making a chief officer of me.’ He did not answer. ‘Of course, I don’t object,’ I continued, stimulated more perhaps by Miss Temple’s than by my own views, ‘to oblige in any possible manner a gentleman’----

‘I am no gentleman,’ said he, with a wave of the hand.

‘----to whom Miss Temple and myself owe our lives. But I may take it that it is thoroughly understood the young lady and myself are to quit your hospitable little ship at the first opportunity that may offer.’

He regarded me in silence for I should say at least a minute; I was positively beginning to believe that he had fallen dumb. At last he seemed to come to life. He nodded slowly three times and said very deliberately: ‘Mr. Dugdale, you and me will be having a talk later on.’

‘But good God, captain,’ cried I, startled out of my assumed manner of indifference or ease, ‘you will at least assure me that you’ll make no difficulty of transhipping us when the chance to do so occurs?’

He was again silent, all the while staring at me; and presently, in a deep voice, said, ‘Later on, sir;’ and with that stood up.

‘How much later on?’ I inquired.

He tapped his brow with his forefinger and answered: ‘It needs reflection, and I must see my way clearly. So far it’s all right. I’m much obliged to ye, I’m sure;’ and he went to the door and held it open, closing it upon himself after I had stepped out.

At the instant I resolved to tell Miss Temple of what had passed; then swiftly thought no! it will only frighten the poor girl, and she cannot advise me; I must wait a little; and with a smiling face I seated myself by her side. But secretly, I was a good deal worried. I chatted lightly, told her that there was nothing whatever significant in the captain’s request that I should check his calculations by independent observations, and did my utmost, by a variety of cheerful small talk referring wholly to our situation, to keep her heart up. Nevertheless, secretly I was much bothered. The man had something on his mind of a dark mysterious nature, it seemed to me; and I could not question that it formed the motive of his interrogatories as to my seamanship, and of his testing my qualities as a navigator by putting a sextant into my hand. Whatever his secret might prove, was it likely to stand between us and our quitting this barque for something homeward bound? It was most intolerably certain that if Captain Braine chose to keep me aboard, I must remain with him. For how should I be able to get away? Suppose I took it upon myself to signal a vessel when he was below: the hailing, the noise of backing the yards, the clamour of the necessary manœuvring, would hardly fail to bring him on deck; and if he chose to order the men to keep all fast with the boat, there could be no help for it; he was captain, and the seamen would obey him.

These thoughts, however, I kept to myself. The day passed quietly. Again and again Miss Temple and I would search the waters for any sign of a ship; but I took notice that the barrenness of the ocean did not produce the same air of profound misery and dejection which I had witnessed in her yesterday. In fact, she had grown weary of complaining; she was beginning to understand the idleness of it. From time to time, though at long intervals, something fretful would escape her, some reference to the wretched discomfort of being without change of apparel; to the misfortune of having fallen in with a ship, whose forecastle people, if her captain was to be believed, were for the most part no better than the company of brigands whom we had scraped clear of that morning. But it seemed to me that she was slowly schooling herself to resignation, that she had formed a resolution to look with some spirit into the face of our difficulties, a posture of mind I was not a little thankful to behold in her, for, God knows, my own anxiety was heavy enough, and I did not want to add to it the sympathetic trouble her grief and despair caused me.

All day long the weather continued very glorious. The captain ordered a short awning to be spread over the poop, and Miss Temple and I sat in the shadow of it during the greater part of the afternoon. There was nothing to read; there was no sort of amusement to enable us to kill the time. Nevertheless, the hours drifted fleetly past in talk. Miss Temple was more communicative than she had ever before been; talked freely of her family, of her friends and acquaintances, of her visits abroad, and the like. She told me that she was never weary of riding, that her chief delight in life was to follow the hounds; and indeed she chatted so fluently on one thing and another that she appeared to forget our situation: a note almost of gaiety entered her voice; her dark eyes sparkled, and the cold, marble-like beauty of her face warmed to the memories which rose in her. I gathered from her conversation that she was the only living child of her mother, and that there was nothing between her and a very tolerable little fortune, as I might infer from her description of the home Lady Temple had kept up in her husband’s life, and that she still, though in a diminished degree, supported for the sake of her daughter, though she herself lay paralysed and helpless, looked after in Miss Temple’s absence by a maiden sister.

I recollect wondering whilst I listened to her that so fine a woman as she, and a fortune to boot, had not long ago married. Was she waiting for some man with whom she could fall in love? or was it some large dream of title and estate that hindered her? or was it that she was without a heart? No, thought I; her heart will have had nothing to do with it. Your heartless girls get married as fast as the rest of them. And was she heartless? It was not easy to let one’s gaze plumb the glowing liquid depths of her eyes, which seemed to my fancy to be charged with the fires of sensibility and passion, and believe her heartless.

There was something wild in the contrast betwixt the imaginations she raised in me by her talk of her home and her pleasures with her own beauty at hand to richly colour every fancy she inspired--betwixt my imagination, I say, and the realities about us, as I would most poignantly feel whenever I sent a glance at old Lush. He was a mule of a man, and stood doggedly at a distance, never addressed nor offered, indeed, to approach us, though sometimes I would catch him taking me in from head to toe out of the corner of his surly eyes. Possibly, my showing that I had a trick of navigation above his knowledge excited his spleen; or maybe his hatred of the captain led him to dislike me because of the apparent intimacy between the skipper and me. Anyway, I would catch myself looking at him now with a feeling of misgiving for which I could find no reason outside of the mere movement of my instincts.

It was in the second dog-watch that evening; Miss Temple was resting in the little cuddy, and I stepped on to the main-deck to smoke a pipe. The topmost canvas of the barque delicately swayed under a cloudless heaven that was darkly, deeply, beautifully blue with the shadow of the coming night. A large star trembled above the ocean verge in the east; but the glow of sunset still lingered in the west over a sea of wonderful smoothness rippling in frosty lines to the breeze that gushed from between the sunset and the north.

The carpenter had charge of the deck; the captain was in his cabin. Whilst I lighted my pipe, I caught sight of the man Joe Wetherly seated on the coaming of the fore-hatch past the little galley. He was puffing at an inch of dusky clay with his arms folded upon his breast, and his countenance composed into an air of sailorly meditation. This seemed an opportunity for me to learn what he had to tell or might be willing to impart about the inner life of the _Lady Blanche_, and I went along the deck in an easy saunter, as though it was my notion to measure the planks for an evening stroll. I started when abreast of him with a manner of pleased surprise.

‘Oh! it is you, Wetherly? My old acquaintance Smallridge’s friend! No sign of the Indiaman, though. I fear we have outrun her by leagues. And always when you are on the lookout for a sail at sea, nothing heaves into sight.’

He rose to my accost, and saluted me with a respectful sea-bow, that is, by scraping his forehead with his knuckle with a little kick back of his left leg.

‘That’s right enough, sir,’ he answered. ‘I’ve been sailing myself in a ship for six weeks in middling busy waters, too, with ne’er a sight of anything--not so much as the tail of a gull.’

‘Pray sit,’ said I; ‘I’ll keep you company. This is the right spot for a smoke and a yarn; quiet and cool and out of the road of the poop.’

He grinned, and we seated ourselves side by side. I talked to him first about the _Countess Ida_, explained the circumstance of my being in company with Miss Temple, told him who she was, and spoke of her shipwrecked condition so far as her wardrobe went, and how eager she was to return to England; but the old sailor made very little of her being in want of a change of dress.

‘There is no need, sir,’ said he, ‘for the lady to distress her mind with considerations of a shift o’ vestments. I allow she can use a needle for herself; there’s needles and thread at her sarvice forrads; and how much linnen do she want? Why one of the skipper’s table-cloths ’ud fit her out, I should say.’ He turned his figure-head of a face upon me as he added: ‘’Tain’t the loss of clothes, sir, as should occupy her thoughts, but the feeling that she’s been took off that there wreck and is safe.’

I fully agreed with him, with some inward laughter, wondering what Miss Temple would think if she had overheard his speech. One thing led to another; at last I said:

‘Wetherly, I am going to ask you a plain question; it is one sailor making inquiry of another, and you’ll accept me as a shipmate, I know.’ He nodded. ‘Is not your captain wanting?’ and I touched my head.

‘Well,’ he answered after a pause, ‘_I_ think so, and I’ve been a-thinking so pretty nigh ever since I’ve been along with him.’

‘What caused his mate’s death?’

‘He died in a swound,’ he answered--‘fell dead alongside the wheel as he was looking into the compass.’

‘Have the sailors noticed anything queer in their captain?’

‘They’re such a party of ignorant scow-bankers,’ said he, with a slow look round, to make sure that the coast was clear, ‘that I don’t believe they’re capable of noticing anything if it ain’t a pannikin of rum shoved under their noses.’

‘I don’t mind whispering to you,’ said I, ‘that the captain hinted to me they were not a very reputable body of men--talked vaguely of mutineers and convicts, with one fellow amongst them,’ I went on, bating my voice to a mere whisper, ‘who had committed a murder.’

He stared at me a moment, and then tilted his cap over his nose to scratch the back of his head.

‘He’ll know more about ’em, then, than I do,’ he responded; ‘they’re ignorant enough to do wrong without troubling themselves much to think of the job when it was over. Mutineering I don’t doubt some of ’em have practised. As to others of ’em being convicts, why who’s to tell? Likely as not, says I. But when it comes to murder--a middling serious charge, ain’t it, sir? Of course I dunno--who might the party be, sir?’

‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, ‘it was a vague sort of talk, as I told you. But if Miss Temple and I are to stick to this ship till we get to the Mauritius, it would comfort her, and me, too, for the matter of that, to learn that her crew are not the band of ruffians we have been led to imagine them.’

‘Well, sir,’ he exclaimed thoughtfully--‘I’m sure you’ll forgive me, but I don’t rightly recollect your name.’

‘Dugdale.’

‘Well, Mr. Dugdale, as you asks for my opinion, I’ll give it ye. Of course, it’ll go no furder, as between man and man.’

‘Certainly not. I am myself trusting you up to the hilt, as what I have said must assure you. You may speak in perfect confidence.’

He cast a cautious look round: ‘There’s but one man to be regularly afeerd of, and that’s Mr. Lush. I believe he’d knife the capt’n right off if so be as he could be sure we men wouldn’t round upon him. I don’t mean to say he han’t got cause to hate the capt’n. He’s a working man without knowledge of perlite customs, and I believe the capt’n’s said more to him than he ought to have said; more than any gen’leman would have dreamt of saying, and all because this here carpenter han’t got the art o’ dining in a way to please the eye. But this here Mr. Lush feels it too much: he’s allowed it to eat into his mind; and if so be there should come a difficulty, the capt’n wouldn’t find a friend in him, and so I tells ye, sir. I don’t want to say more n’s necessary and proper to this here occasion of your questions; but though the crew’s a desperate ignorant one, ne’er a man among ’em capable of writing or spelling any more’n the carpenter hisself, there’s only _him_ to be afeerd of, so far as I’m capable of disarning; though, of course, if he should tarn to and try and work up their feelings, there’s naturally no telling how the sailors ’ud show.’

‘They seem a pretty smart set of fellows,’ said I, finding but little comfort to be got out of this long-winded delivery; ‘the ship is beautifully clean, and everything looks to be going straight aboard of you.’

‘Oh! every man can do his bit,’ he answered; ‘but if I was you, sir, being in charge, as you are, of a beautiful young lady, for the likes of which this here little barque, with nothen but men aboard and such shabby food as goes aft, is no proper place--if I was you, I says, says I, I’d get away as soon as ever I could.’

I mentally bestowed a few sea-blessings on the head of this marine Job’s comforter, but contrived, nevertheless, to look as though I was much obliged to him for his information and advice; and after we had continued discoursing on a variety of nautical topics for some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour longer, I proceeded aft, and spent the rest of the evening in conversing with Miss Temple in the cabin or in walking the deck with her.

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME

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