Part 7

For a week following she was so completely in the dumps it was hard to get a word from her. Sometimes she looked as if she had been secretly crying, yet I never could persuade myself that the appearance her eyes would at such times present was due to weeping. She moped apart. Some of the passengers noticed her behaviour and spoke to me about it, thinking she was ill. The ship’s surgeon talked with her, and assured me privately he could find nothing wrong save that she complained of poorness of spirits.

“She seems to hate the idea of India,” said he, “and wants to go home.”

And so she shall (thought I), but she must arrive in India first, where she may leave it to me to square the yards for her with the Reverend Joseph Moxon.

We blew westwards round the Cape before a strong gale of wind. One morning, at the grey of dawn, I was aroused by a knocking on my cabin door. The second mate entered. He was a man named Wickham, a bullet-headed, immensely strong, active seaman, the younger son of a baronet: he would have held command at that time but for “the drink.” He grasped a woman’s hat and handkerchief, and exclaimed—

“I’ve just found these in the port mizzen chains, sir. I can’t tell how they happen to have come there. It looks like mischief.”

I sprang from my cot partially clothed, as I invariably was on turning in, and taking the hat in my hand, and bringing it to the clearer light of the large cabin window, I seemed to remember it as having been worn by Minnie Mills. I snatched the handkerchief from the man, and saw the initials M. M. marked upon it. This sufficed. I swiftly and completely clothed myself and entered the saloon.

My first act was to send the second mate for the stewardess. The woman arrived out of the steerage, where she slept. I said—speaking softly that the people in the berths on either hand might not be disturbed—

“Go and look into Miss Mills’ cabin, and report to me if all is well there.”

She went, vanished, was some little while out of sight; then reappeared and approached me, pale in the ashen light that was filtering through the skylights.

“Miss Mills’ cabin is empty, sir.”

I was prepared for this piece of news; yet my heart beat with a fast sick pulse when, without speech, I went to the girl’s berth, followed by the stewardess. The bunk had been occupied—the bed-clothes lay tossed in it. My eye, travelling rapidly over the interior, was quickly taken by a note lying upon a chest of drawers. It was addressed to me, and ran thus:—

“I am weary of life, and have resolved to end it. The thought of living even for a short while with Mr. Moxon at Junglepore has broken my heart, and you are as tyrannical and cruel to me as life itself. Farewell, and thank you for such kindness as you have shown me, and when you see my father tell him that I died loving him and blessing him.”

“Good God! She’s committed suicide!” cried I.

The stewardess shrieked.

I felt mad with amazement and grief. I read and re-read her letter, and then looked round the berth again, wondering if this were not some practical joke which she intended should be tragical by the fright it excited. I then went to work to make inquiries. I roused up Mr. Aiken, and, showing him the girl’s note, asked him if he had seen her on deck during his watch—if he himself had at any time foreboded this dreadful thing—if he could help me with any suggestions or information. He read the letter and stared blankly; his handsome countenance was as pale as milk whilst he eyed me. I seemed to find the ghastly mildness of a dead man’s face in his looks. He had nothing to say. No lady had come on deck in his watch. He had not exchanged a sentence with Miss Mills since that night when I threatened to break him if I found him in her company.

The men who had steered the ship throughout the night were brought out of the forecastle: no man had seen any lady jump overboard or slip into the mizzen-chains—not likely! Wouldn’t the helmsman, seeing such a thing, yell out?

The morning was now advanced. The passengers came from their berths, and it was quickly known fore and aft that the beautiful young girl who had been moping apart for three weeks past as though slowly going mad with melancholy had committed suicide by jumping overboard. The doctor and I and the two mates spent a long time whilst we overhung the mizzen-chains in conjecturing how she had managed it. The cabin windows were small: she had certainly never squeezed her fine ripe figure through the porthole of her berth; therefore she had come on to the poop in some black hour of the night by way of the quarter-deck, passing like a shadow to leeward till she arrived at the mizzen-rigging, where the deep dye flung upon the blackness by the mizzen—for it had been a quiet night, the ship under all plain sail—completely shrouded her. The rest would be easy, and if she dropped from the chains, which, through the angle of the deck, were depressed to within a few feet of the water, her fall might have been almost soundless.

The blow to me was terrible, and for some days I was prostrated. So unnecessary, I kept on saying to myself. Good heavens! For weeks I had been on the verge of proposing to her. The offer of my hand would have saved her life. I could not reconcile so enormous an act with the insignificance of the occasion for it. Old Mills was no tyrant. He had not _driven_ her to India. She had consented—with an ill grace perhaps, not caring for the man she was going to; but there had been acquiescence on her part too, enough of it, at all events, to make one wonder that she should have destroyed herself. How should I be able to meet the old captain? Where was I to find the spirit to tell him the story?

The stewardess, to satisfy herself, thoroughly searched the after part of the ship. It came to my ears that she did not believe that the girl had committed suicide, having neither cause nor courage for such an act. She fancied that one or another of the passengers had hidden her. But for what purpose? The fool of a woman could not answer _that_ when the question was put to her. What end would the girl’s hiding achieve? She was bound to come to light on our arrival at Bombay. What motive, then, could she have for concealing herself, for denying herself the refreshment of the deck in the Indian Ocean, ultimately to be shamefully revealed as an impostor capable of the most purposeless and idiotic of deceits?

The beauty was overboard and dead, and my heart, what with disappointed love and grieving for her and sorrow for her poor old father, weighed as lead in me when I thought of it.

We were within a fortnight’s sail of Bombay, when there broke a dawn thick and dirty as smoke, with masses of sooty vapour smouldering off the edge of the sea in the west and darkening overhead till the trucks faded out in the gloom. Yet the glass stood high, and I made nothing of the mere appearance of this weather. It lasted all day, with now and again a distant groan of thunder. A weak, hot breeze held the canvas steady, and the ship wrinkled onward, holding her course, but sailing through a noon that was as evening for shadow.

We dined at seven. The deck was then in charge of the second mate, Wickham. Before going below I told him to keep a bright look-out, and took myself an earnest view of the sea. The dusk lay very thick upon the cold, greasy, gleaming surface of the ocean, there was not a star overhead, and maybe a man would not have been able to see a distance of half a dozen ship’s lengths.

About the middle of dinner I heard a great bawling, a loud and fearful crying out as for life or death. The mate, Aiken, who sat at the foot of the long cuddy table, caught the sound with a sailor’s ear as I did, and sprang to his feet, and we rushed on deck together. I had scarcely passed through the companion hatch when the ship was struck. She heeled violently over, listing on a sudden to an angle of nearly fifty degrees, and a dismal, loud, general shriek rose through the open skylight, accompanied by the crash of timber overhead. Along with this went a wild hissing noise and an extraordinary sound of throbbing.

I rushed to the side, and saw that a large steamer had run into us. She was a big black paddle-boat, one of the few large side-wheel steamers which formerly traded betwixt England and the East Indies by way of the Cape. The sky seemed charged with stars from the spangles of fire which floated along with the thick smoke from her chimney. She was full of light. Every cabin window looked like the lens of a flaming bull’s-eye.

I sprang on to the rail, and, hailing the steamer, asked him to keep his stem into us till we found out what damage he had done, and then roared to the mate, but obtained no reply. I yelled again, then shouted to Wickham to tell the carpenter to sound the well. The passengers came crowding on to the poop. I told them there was no danger; that, though it should come to our leaving the ship, the steamer would stand by us and take all aboard.

The well was sounded, and two feet of water reported. On this I instantly understood that the ship was doomed, that to call the hands to the pumps would be to exhaust them to no purpose; and, hailing the steamer afresh as she lay hissing on our bow, with her looming stem-head overshadowing our forecastle, I reported our condition, and told him to stand-by to pick us up.

We immediately lowered the boats and sent away the women and as many men as there was room for; a second trip emptied the _Hecla_ of her passengers. Meanwhile the steamer, at my request, kept her bows right into us. At this time there were seven feet of water in the hold. It was very black, and we worked with the help of lanterns. The mate appeared amongst my people now, and I asked him with an oath, out of the rage and distress of that hour, where he had been skulking. He answered, he was from the forecastle. I told him he was a liar, and ordered him whilst the ship swam to take a number of the hands into the cabin and save as much of the passengers’ effects as they could come at.

Not much time was permitted for this: every minute I seemed to feel the ship settling deeper and deeper with a sickening, sullen lift of her whole figure to every heave of the swell, as though she rose wearily to make her farewell plunge. Now the vessels were disengaged, and the steamer lay close abreast. I lingered, almost heart-broken, scarcely yet realizing to its full height this tragic disaster to my ship and my own fortunes; and then, hearing them calling to me, I got into the mizzen-chains, thinking, as I did so, of Minnie Mills, wishing to God I was at rest and out of it all where she lay, and entered one of the boats.

The commander of the steamer received me in the gangway. The decks were light as noontide with lanterns. He was a grey-haired man, tall and somewhat stately, dressed in a uniform after the pattern of the old East India Company’s service. When he understood I was the captain he bowed, and said—

“It’s a terrible calamity, sir. I hope to live to see the day when they will compel all masters, by Act of Parliament, to show lights at sea at night.”

A lantern was sparkling on his fore-stay, but our ship was without side-lights, and when I turned to look at her the roar of her bursting decks came along in a shock hard as a blow on the ear, and the whole pale fabric of canvas melted out upon the black water as a wreath of vapour dies in the breeze.

The steamer was the _Nourmahal_, Bulstrode commander. She was half full of invalided soldiers and other folks going home, and when our own people were aboard she was an overloaded craft, humanly speaking; but after a consultation with me the captain resolved to proceed. He was flush with water and provisions, and had the security besides of paddles, which slapped an easy ten knots into the hull. And then, again, she lifted the yards of a ship of twelve hundred tons, and showed as big a topsail to the wind as a frigate’s.

All that could be done was done for us. Men turned out of their cabins to accommodate the ladies and children, and a cot was slung for me in the chief officer’s berth. But I needed no pillow for my head that first night. There was nothing in laudanum short of a death-draught that could have given me sleep.

But to pass by my own state of mind, that came very near to a suicidal posture. At eight bells next morning, the mate whose cabin I shared stepped in and exclaimed, “Did you know you had a woman dressed up as a man amongst your passengers?”

“No!” I exclaimed, “not likely. I should not permit such a thing.”

“It’s so, then,” said he: “our doctor twigged her at once, and handed her over to the stewardess, who has berthed her aft. She’s a lady, and a devilish pretty woman,—mighty pale, though, with a scared, wild blind look, as though she had been dug up out of darkness, and couldn’t get used to the light.”

“What name does she give?” said I.

“I don’t know.”

I wished immediately to see her. An extraordinary suspicion worked in my head. The mate told me she was in the stewardess’s berth, and directed me to it. I knocked. The stewardess opened the door, and I immediately saw standing in the middle of the berth, with her hands to her head, pinning a bronze tress to a bed of glowing coils, Miss Minnie Mills!

I stared frantically, shouted “Good God!” and rushed in. She screamed and shrank, then clasped her hands, and reared herself loftily with a bringing of her whole shape, so to speak, together.

“So,” said I, breathing short with astonishment and twenty conflicting passions, “and this is how they commit suicide in your country, hey?”

The stewardess enlarged her eyes.

“I don’t mean to marry Mr. Joseph Moxon,” said the girl.

“In what part of the ship did you hide?” I exclaimed.

She made no answer.

“Was Mr. Aiken in the secret?”

Still no reply.

“Oh, but you should answer the captain, miss,” cried the stewardess.

The girl burst into tears, and turned her back upon me. I stepped out and asked for Captain Bulstrode. He received me in his cabin, and then I told him the story of Miss Minnie Mills.

“I never would take charge of a young lady,” said he, half laughing, though he was a good deal astonished, “after an experience I underwent in that way. I’ll tell it you another time. Let’s send for your mate, and see what he has to say for himself.”

Presently Mr. Aiken arrived. He was pale, but he carried a lofty, independent air; the fact was, I was no longer his captain. The ship was sunk, and Jack was as good as his master. I requested, representing Captain Mills as I did, that he would be candid with me, tell me how it stood between him and Miss Mills, if he had helped her in her plot of suicide, where he had hidden her in the ship, and what he meant to do. I thought Bulstrode looked at him with an approving eye. I am bound to repeat he was an uncommonly handsome fellow.

“Captain Cleaver,” he said, addressing me with a very frank, straightforward face and air, “I am perfectly aware that I have done wrong, sir. But the long and short of it is, Miss Mills and I are in love with each other, and we mean to get married.”

“Why didn’t you tell me so?” I said.

He looked at me knowingly. I felt myself colour.

“Well,” said I, “anyhow, it was so confoundedly unnecessary, you know, for her to pretend to drown herself, and for you to hold her in hiding.”

“I beg your pardon—you made it rather necessary, sir—you will remember that night——”

“So unnecessary!” I thundered out in a passion.

“Where did ye hide her?” said Captain Bulstrode.

“I decline to answer that question,” replied Aiken.

And the dog kept his word, for we never succeeded in getting the truth out of him, or the girl either; though if she did not lie secret in the blackness of the after-hold, then I don’t know in what other part of the ship he could have kept her: certainly not in his own cabin, which the ship’s steward was in and out of often, nor in any of the cuddy or steerage berths.

To end this: there was a clergyman in the ship; and Bulstrode, who, without personal knowledge of Captain Mills, had heard of him and respected him, insisted upon the couple being married that same forenoon. They were not loth, and, the parson consenting, they were spliced in the presence of a full saloon. I shook the girl by the hand when the business was over, and wished her well; but from beginning to end it was all so unnecessary!

_THE MAJOR’S COMMISSION._

My name is Henry Adams, and in 1854 I was mate of a ship of 1200 tons named the _Jessamy Bride_. June of that year found her at Calcutta with cargo to the hatches, and ready to sail for England in three or four days.

I was walking up and down the ship’s long quarter-deck, sheltered by the awning, when a young apprentice came aft and said a gentleman wished to speak to me. I saw a man standing in the gangway; he was a tall, soldierly person, about forty years of age, with iron-grey hair and spiked moustache, and an aquiline nose. His eyes were singularly bright and penetrating. He immediately said—

“I wanted to see the captain; but as chief officer you’ll do equally well. When does this ship sail?”

“On Saturday or Monday next.”

He ran his eye along the decks and then looked aloft: there was something bird-like in the briskness of his way of glancing.

“I understand you don’t carry passengers?”

“That’s so, sir, though there’s accommodation for them.”

“I’m out of sorts, and have been sick for months, and want to see what a trip round the Cape to England will do for me. I shall be going home, not for my health only, but on a commission. The Maharajah of Ratnagiri, hearing I was returning to England on sick-leave, asked me to take charge of a very splendid gift for Her Majesty the Queen of England. It is a diamond, valued at fifteen thousand pounds.”

He paused to observe the effect of this communication, and then proceeded—

“I suppose you know how the Koh-i-noor was sent home?”

“It was conveyed to England, I think,” said I, “by H.M.S. _Medea_, in 1850.”

“Yes; she sailed in April that year, and arrived at Portsmouth in June. The glorious gem was intrusted to Colonel Mackieson and Captain Ramsay. It was locked up in a small box along with other jewels, and each officer had a key. The box was secreted in the ship by them, and no man on board the vessel, saving themselves, knew where it was hidden.”

“Was that so?” said I, much interested.

“Yes; I had the particulars from the commander of the vessel, Captain Lockyer. When do you expect your skipper on board?” he exclaimed, darting a bright, sharp look around him.

“I cannot tell. He may arrive at any moment.”

“The having charge of a stone valued at fifteen thousand pounds, and intended as a gift for the Queen of England, is a deuce of a responsibility,” said he. “I shall borrow a hint from the method adopted in the case of the Koh-i-noor. I intend to hide the stone in my cabin, so as to extinguish all risk, saving, of course, what the insurance people call the act of God. May I look at your cabin accommodation?”

“Certainly.”

I led the way to the companion hatch, and he followed me into the cabin. The ship had berthing room for eight or ten people irrespective of the officers who slept aft. But the vessel made no bid for passengers. She left them to Blackwall liners, to the splendid ships of Green, Money Wigram, and Smith, and to the P. & O. and other steam lines. The overland route was then the general choice; few of their own decision went by way of the Cape. No one had booked with us down to this hour, and we had counted upon having the cabin to ourselves.

The visitor walked into every empty berth, and inspected it as carefully as though he had been a Government surveyor. He beat upon the walls and bulkheads with his cane, sent his brilliant gaze into the corners and under the bunks and up at the ceiling, and finally said, as he stepped from the last of the visitable cabins—

“This decides me. I shall sail with you.”

I bowed and said I was sure the captain would be glad of the pleasure of his company.

“I presume,” said he, “that no objection will be raised to my bringing a native carpenter aboard to construct a secret place, as in the case of the Koh-i-noor, for the Maharajah’s diamond?”

“I don’t think a native carpenter would be allowed to knock the ship about,” said I.

“Certainly not. A little secret receptacle—big enough to receive this,” said he, putting his hand in his side pocket and producing a square Morocco case, of a size to berth a bracelet or a large brooch. “The construction of a nook to conceal this will not be knocking your ship about?”

“It’s a question for the captain and the agents, sir,” said I.

He replaced the case, whose bulk was so inconsiderable that it did not bulge in his coat when he had pocketed it, and said, now that he had inspected the ship and the accommodation, he would call at once upon the agents. He gave me his card and left the vessel.

The card bore the name of a military officer of some distinction. Enough if, in this narrative of a memorable and extraordinary incident, I speak of him as Major Byron Hood.

The master of the _Jessamy Bride_ was Captain Robert North. This man had, three years earlier, sailed with me as my chief mate; it then happened I was unable to quickly obtain command, and accepted the offer of mate of the _Jessamy Bride_, whose captain, I was surprised to hear, proved the shipmate who had been under me, but who, some money having been left to him, had purchased an interest in the firm to which the ship belonged. We were on excellent terms; almost as brothers, indeed. He never asserted his authority, and left it to my own judgment to recognize his claims. I am happy to know he had never occasion to regret his friendly treatment of me.

He came on board in the afternoon of that day on which Major Hood had visited the ship, and was full of that gentleman and his resolution to carry a costly diamond round the Cape under sail, instead of making his obligation as brief as steam and the old desert route would allow.

“I’ve had a long talk with him up at the agents’,” said Captain North. “He don’t seem well.”

“Suffering from his nerves, perhaps,” said I.

“He’s a fine, gentlemanly person. He told Mr. Nicholson he was twice wounded, naming towns which no Christian man could twist his tongue into the sound of.”

“Will he be allowed to make a hole in the ship to hide his diamond in?”

“He has agreed to make good any damage done, and to pay at the rate of a fare and a half for the privilege of hiding the stone.”

“Why doesn’t he give the thing into your keeping, sir? This jackdaw-like hiding is a sort of reflection on our honesty, isn’t it, captain?”

He laughed and answered, “No; I like such reflections, for my part. Who wants to be burdened with the custody of precious things belonging to other people? Since he’s to have the honour of presenting the diamond, let the worry of taking care of it be his; this ship’s enough for me.”

“He’ll be knighted, I suppose, for delivering this stone,” said I. “Did he show it to you, sir?”

“No.”

“He has it in his pocket.”

“He produced the case,” said Captain North. “A thing about the size of a muffin. Where’ll he hide it? But we’re not to be curious in _that_ direction,” he added, smiling.