CHAPTER VI A STRANGE MAN ON BOARD
A few mornings after this, whilst we were at breakfast, the mate looked down upon us through the open skylight, and called out:
'There's a sail right ahead.'
When we went on deck we found the vessel on the lee bow, within signalling distance. The wind was the tail of the trade, a fiery fanning out of north-north-east, with the loose scud brown as smoke flying down it. The sea was full of violet gleams and blinkings of froth; the billow ran without weight and its volume was small. It seemed as if the heat was sucking the wind out of the sky, and still we were a good many degrees north of the equator, though I cannot recollect the latitude.
A signal of flags was run aloft to the end of the mizzen gaff: the string of gay colours painted the wind and made a holiday figure of the ship in a moment. When the stranger perceived our signal she hauled down the red flag of the English merchant service which had been flying at her trysail peak ever since we had been able to distinguish it, and hoisted a long, thin streamer called an answering pennant.
'All right!' exclaimed Captain Burke, putting down the glass he had been viewing through. 'She is an Englishman, and is, no doubt, bound home. Get your letter ready, Miss Otway, and if that brig is for England I will send it across to her.'
I ran to my cabin. The mere thought of communicating with home filled me with excitement. This, though we had been some weeks at sea, was the first opportunity for sending a letter home that had occurred. And then little things on the ocean stir and move one greatly. Life is so dull that the merest trifle is important, and what would scarcely be noticeable ashore takes the aspect of a wonder.
I had kept my journal punctually down to the preceding evening, and had now only to write that a brig was approaching and would take the letter, and send a thousand kisses to father and to Archie. I added that I was happy and greatly improved in health. I lingered over this bit of writing. It was like holding on to the dear hands of those I addressed.
When I had made an end, I went on deck with the letter. The brig had slided abreast of us by this time: she looked a very smart little vessel, with sharp bows and raking masts, very lofty. She had backed her topsail as we had ours, and the two vessels lay within speaking distance, bowing to one another with all imaginable civility. I laughed to notice this; you would have thought them old acquaintances who couldn't salute each other too often for delight in this meeting.
'Brig ahoy!' hailed Captain Burke.
'Hallo!' shouted a man standing a head and shoulders above the bulwark rail with a staring negro at the wheel, showing a little past him, whenever the brig swayed, her sand-coloured decks to us.
'What ship is that, and where are you bound for?'
'"The Queen o' the Night" from Mauritius vur Liverpool, a hundred and ten days out. What ship's yon?'
The information was fully given, and then Captain Burke bawled out to know if the other would carry a letter home for him?
'Ay, ay, but ye mun send it,' waved back the head and shoulders, with a flourish of arm.
Captain Burke flourished in response. Sailors talk more eloquently by gesture than the people of any nation in the world. The contortion of a hump-backed posture will in an instant reveal a voyage full of troubles, and more than half an hour of talk is contained in a peculiar toss of the hand.
A number of the crew came running aft to the call of the mate: a quarter-boat was cleared and lowered, four men entered her along with the mate, who put my letter into his pocket and away they went for the brig, miraculously vitalising and humanising the desert plain of ocean by the mere picture of their straining forms and flashing oars, and the gilt lines running astern from the white sides of the boat as she was swept through it with Mr. Green's square frame, stiff-backed in the stern, bobbing cask-like with the jump of the little craft, his hand on the tiller.
'One could almost think oneself at the seaside to see that boat,' said Mrs. Burke.
'Yes, I just now caught myself half looking round,' I answered, 'with a fancy of tall chalk cliffs, a little pier, a nest of houses in a split——'
I paused.
'And a fine house on the top of the cliff, and trees at the back, and a flight of rooks going up like smoke out of them,' said Mrs. Burke, smiling.
'It'll not be far off even, when we've gone all the way we've got to go,' said the captain, 'and by the time we've hove it into sight again, we shall have been as good as our word, Miss—good as the doctor's word anyhow. What now would I give for some portrait machine that takes colour and light instantaneously, that when they get your letter they might see you as we do!'
Mr. Green handed up the letter to the man who had hailed us, and returned. The boat was then hoisted, the topsail swung, and the ensign dipped as a farewell and thank you to the little homeward-bound brig. I stood straining my eyes at her as her topsail swept out of hollow shadow into a full breast of sunshine, and I watched her break the long, soft, glittering wave into a little leap of scaling and combing foam at her bow, leaning from the hot quiet wind with yard-arm sharply pointed to it, in a posture of something living that steadies itself aslant for a firmer grip. She was my ocean post-office. I cannot express my thoughts as I viewed her thinning down and growing blue in the atmosphere that was silver blue with water and blue sky, and brimming sunshine. Captain Burke said she would probably arrive in Liverpool before we were up with the Horn, for all that the catspaw and the calm and the hard head wind had dismally belated her down to this time.
And now it is that a dreadful thing happened, making this day, with what had gone before, the most remarkable of any to that hour.
We were standing under the fore end of the quarter-deck awning, where we could command the heights of the main and fore as well as see the brig astern. Whilst Captain Burke was talking to me about her, his wife hard by listening, assuring me I need have no doubt if the vessel safely arrived at her port that her master would forward the letter to my father, seeing that captains of ships hold this sort of obligation as sacred: I say whilst the captain was talking thus, he happened to look aloft, and, following the direction of his eye, I saw a seaman on the weather fore topsail yard; his feet were on the foot-rope, he overlay the yard, the outline of his figure clear as a tracing in ink with his yellow naked calves and feet dingy against the white canvas. What he did I could not see.
The captain broke off and eyed the man intently; then, looking round a little at Mr. Green, he exclaimed, 'What does that fellow mean by sogering up there? I've been watching him. Who is it? Call him down. I don't want any loafing of that sort aboard my ship.'
The mate went some steps forward and, looking up, bellowed in a voice as harsh as the noise of surf on shingle, 'Fore topsail yard there! Come down out of that, you ——' and here he employed several examples of the forecastle speech which I will not write down because they are not proper to remember, though we are to believe that the business of the sea cannot be got through without brutal language.
The man looked down at the mate, and said something; Mr. Green roared out again to him to 'lay down,' on which I observed the sailor slided a yard or two along the foot-ropes towards the topmast rigging; he then fell!
He struck the deck near the galley. Mrs. Burke shrieked. The man got up in a moment, stood erect with blood gushing down his cheeks, and smiled at us, and the next moment dropped dead.
I fainted, and when I came to my head was resting on Mrs. Burke's knee, and Captain Burke was fanning me. The body had been carried into the forecastle, a couple of seamen were scrubbing at the stains in the white planks. Mr. Owen came slowly aft, and said that the poor fellow was dead; then saw to me, took me by the hand, and seated me in the coolness under the awning, where the pleasant shadow was fresh with the gushing of the wind out of the hollow of the great mizzen.
It was a frightful thing to have seen. I was looking at the man when he fell, and my sight followed the flash of the poor figure to the shocking thud of the deck! I saw him rise and smile—a smile made dreadful by blood and heart-subduing by the suddenness of his falling back dead.
'How'll Mr. Green like to recall the violent words he used to the poor fellow, I wonder?' said Mrs. Burke, glancing at the mate, who, to be sure, showed no sensibility. He trudged the deck athwartship with rounded back and arms up and down in the sea fashion; occasionally leering at the sky to windward, or darting a sour look at the canvas aloft. He was no man to muse with regret on the death of the sailor, and lament his own intemperate speech; on the contrary, he was one of those mates who sometimes become masters, to whom human life, provided their own be not imperilled, is of no more consequence than the extinction of the flame of the slush-fed lamp which lights the sailor's sea-parlour. There were many dogs of that sort at sea in those times, and some have survived into these; but the odious breed grows scarce. Indeed, the world has agreed to find the type intolerable, and may the day be at hand when the very last of the race shall be brought to the gangway in the holy grip of the giantess Education, and dropped overboard to plumb the depths of time, where lie the green bones of Trunnion, Hatchway, and others of the clan!
Mr. Owen recommended that the body should be buried that afternoon. The weather was very hot; the breeze was slackening and the sea sheeting out—full of fitful winding lanes of light as though the sun struck upon wakes and tracks of oil—into the thickening distance, where the heat was showing in a sensible presence of film, blending sky and water till it was like looking at them through tears.
'Very well,' said Captain Burke; 'in the first dog watch, if you please.'
It was at that hour almost calm, with a broad road of hot red light, billowing snakelike from the ship's side over the soft undulations of the western swell towards the rayless sun that still floated at some height in the sky. I stood beside Mrs. Burke on the quarter-deck, prayer-book in hand; the sailors came in a body from forward, and amongst them they bore the corpse—an outline of tragic suggestion under the large red ensign that hid it. They lifted out a portion of the gangway and rested one end of the plank in the gap, and the captain began to read.
What is there in shore-going ceremony to compare in solemnity, in pathos, in all the deepest of the meanings which are interpretable out of human forms and customs, with the simple burial at sea? All was as silent upon the water as the sinking of the sun himself into the broadening road of gold under him. Aloft was a gentle sound of winnowing canvas; a sob of the sea from alongside sometimes broke in upon the captain's delivery.
The expressions on the faces of the rough seamen were for the most part fixed. How many shipmates and messmates had they helped bury in their time? How should they be concerned by death? themselves having the Skeleton at their heels every hour of their existence at sea, allowed but a crooked finger for their own lives, all the remainder of their hands being their owner's!
Now, knowing sailors as I do, I can read those seamen's faces by the aid of memory, and almost tell their thoughts as they stood there near the gangway.
'Well, poor Bill, there he lies.'—'My turn next perhaps.'—'What's that yarn the skipper's a-reading? A blooming good job for them it's true of! No call to talk of souls at sea. It's work hard, live hard, and die hard here; and what's arterwards there's Bill there to say.'
At a signal the flag was withdrawn, the stitched hammock was revealed, the plank was tilted, and the grim parcel despatched.
The night that followed was breathless and beautiful. In the south-east under the moon the water stretched in a stainless field of light, flashing, but still as a sheet of looking-glass; our sails glowed blandly like starlight itself as they rose one above another into the whitened gloom in whose clear profound many meteors were darting, leaving a smoke of spangles for all the world like sky-rockets under the large trembling stars. Lovely they were: but for the moon I think many had studded the water with points of light, to ride and widen upon the black and noiseless lift of swell, thick and sluggish as though it were oil that ran, and scarcely putting three moons'-breadth of motion into our mastheads, though it sweetened the air with the rain of dew it softly beat out of the canvas.
The cabin was too hot to sit in. There was no magic in two windsails and a wide skylight to cool it. I had played at cribbage with Mrs. Burke till, with a yawn, the hour being about half-past nine, I proposed that we should go on deck. The steward followed us with a tray of refreshments; the captain and Mr. Owen joined us, pipes in mouth, and we sat, nothing betwixt us and the stars but the moonlit shadow of the night through which we saw them.
Four bells were struck, ten o'clock; there was no light forward saving a little sheen of the forecastle lamp round about the fore-scuttle, like a dim luminous mist there. But the moon lay bright upon the white planks of the deck, and though the rigging rose pale as tarnished silver to the mastheads it made a network of shadows black as ebony, which swung with the roll of the ship as though they kept time to music.
I was looking at some of this delicate network on the main deck when the figure of a man passed through it and approached the boatswain, who had charge of the ship till midnight. They talked with a rumble in their notes that was as good as telling you something was wrong. The captain called out:
'What does that man want?'
The boatswain then came to us, leaving the man standing, and exclaimed, 'He says there's a strange sailor in the ship.'
'What's that?' demanded Captain Burke.
'He says there's a man walking about as don't belong to the ship's company.'
'Whose grog has he been cribbing?' said Mr. Owen.
The captain called to the man, who came and stood before us. The moonlight whitened him: he was a powerfully built fellow, with a quantity of black hair hanging about his ears and dark nervous eyes, which caught the light in silver stars.
'What's this about a strange man being aboard?' said the captain.
'There's a strange man in the ship, sir,' he answered.
And now I observed that in the black shadow of the galley forward there stood a little group of men, apparently striving to hear what was spoken aft.
'Have you seen him?'
'Certainly I have, sir.'
'Go on,' exclaimed the captain, impatiently.
'I was on the fok'sle when he passed me. He walked slow. He looked at me as he passed, and his face was wet.'
'How could you tell that in this light?' said Mr. Owen.
'The moonshine rippled in it, sir.'
'Go on,' said the captain.
'He was going aft as though just come out of the head. I made a step or two and lost him.'
'Where did he disappear?' said the boatswain in a voice of awe.
'Why, in the gloom about the foremast.'
'It'll be a stowaway come to light at a pretty late date,' exclaimed Captain Burke, stiffening himself in his chair with a start of temper. 'Bo'sun, get a lantern, and take and give everything forward a good overhaul.'
'It's no stowaway, sir,' said the man who had seen the stranger.
'Ho, d'ye know him, then?' cried the captain.
'He was no stowaway,' repeated the seaman in a sudden roaring voice of irrepressible excitement.
The captain stared at him.
'You won't make him a ghost, will you?' said Mr. Owen.
The man viewed the doctor in silence, then suddenly shouted, whipping round upon the boatswain:
'Tom Hartley saw him.'
'Call Tom Hartley aft,' exclaimed the captain.
The name was bawled by the boatswain, and repeated in echoes like distant laughter aloft. Then a man stepped out of the huddle of figures in the shadow of the galley and came through the moonlight, followed by four or five who halted at the gangway.
'What's this you've seen, Hartley?' said Captain Burke.
'I was at the scuttle butt with the dipper in my hand, when, turning my head to look forrard, I see the shadow of a man with the glimmer of a face upon it standing near the foremast. I took a step, thinking it was one of the men, and lost it.'
'How d'ye mean, lost it?' said the captain.
'It sort of went out, sir.'
'Take a lantern and search the ship forward, bo'sun,' said the captain.
The three of them went forward, but I heard the first man tell the boatswain that the way to see the stranger that had come aboard was not by showing a light.
'What's the meaning of it?' said Mrs. Burke.
The captain rose in silence and walked the deck, going somewhat towards the gangway, and staring forward and around. The group of seamen had followed the boatswain, and were now on the forecastle, a knot of silvered figures with their shadows like carvings of jet lying at their feet.
'Was it a strange man they saw?' I asked. 'If so, how did he come into the ship?' and I own a chill ran through me as I asked the question.
The mystery and awe of this wonderful, beautiful night of moonlight and trance of ocean, glazed by the nightbeam as though it were an ice-field, was in this hour to heighten into a sort of horror the fancy of a strange man with a wet face walking forward; and then again there was the memory of the death in the morning and the burial before sundown. Mrs. Burke was silent, and I saw her watching her husband as he uneasily moved here and there.
'Pity it's happened,' said Mr. Owen. 'It's all nonsense, of course. They'll find nobody. A very small optical illusion will carry conviction into the brain of a noodle. All sailors are noodles in superstition. And now all hands'll think there's a ghost aboard.'
Captain Burke rejoined us abruptly, and seated himself.
'They'll find nothing,' said he.
'So I was just saying,' said the doctor.
'But that'll be the worst of it,' exclaimed the captain. 'I wish it had been that confounded seaman's watch below. I don't like such things as this to happen in my ship.'
'Why, Captain Burke, you don't mean to tell me——?' said Mr. Owen, catching, as I did, the note of awe and nervousness in the other's utterance.
'I tell you what it is,' burst out the captain irritably; 'it's devilish hot to-night, I know. Is this the Red Sea?'
'Would it were, for that's where all the ghosts are laid,' said the doctor good-humouredly.
'I'm no infidel,' said the captain. 'I thank God I have my faith. There's testimony enough in the Bible to the existence of ghosts to satisfy any Christian man.'
'Why, Edward,' cried Mrs. Burke, 'do you want to frighten Miss Marie?' and she poured out a small tumbler of brandy and seltzer for him; he swallowed the draught and said:
'They'll find nothing; which will prove, of course,' said he, looking at me, 'that there is nothing.'
And then he began to talk a little mysteriously of a brig that had sailed out of Cork; the crimps or runners had bundled a man stone drunk into the forecastle, where the captain let him lie for a day or two, guessing he would rally and turn to; instead of which they found him dead, and there was no doubt he had been dead when put on board, the crimps shipping the corpse in order to secure the man's wages. They buried the loathly thing, but every night throughout the voyage the apparition of it moved in the forepart of the vessel, and always its ghostly hand struck one bell, which is half an hour past midnight at sea, after which the shape disappeared, and the watch on deck breathed freely again. I say Captain Burke talked of this brig a little mysteriously, as though he secretly believed in the story, yet was ashamed we should think he did so.
Whilst Mr. Owen was trying to make Mrs. Burke and me laugh with some silly story of a spectre, the boatswain came aft.
'Well,' said the captain.
'There's no strange man forward, sir.'
'Where have ye searched?'
The boatswain named all sorts of places.
'All right!' said the captain, springing to his feet. 'It's happened right or wrong, and must take time to wear off. The dew is heavy: I recommend Miss Otway to go below.'